REVELATION 
AND ITS RECORD 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSHi 



REVELATION AND 
ITS RECORD 



BY 
WILLIAM W. GUTH 

President 
College of the Pacific 



The word of God is not bound " 

Paul 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1912 



Ox% 



Copyright, 1912 
Sherman, French & Company 



g CI. A 3190 10 



TO 

HELEN 



PREFACE 

In current thought there are many who hold 
to the belief that revelation is a body of truth 
handed down in the past and recorded in writ- 
ing. 1 Even some writers of progressive ten- 
dency draw a distinction between natural and 
revealed truth, the first being truth which man 
arrives at on his own account, the second being 
truth which came or must come direct from the 
mind of Omniscience. 

All truth is revelation and all revelation is 
natural. The idea one man would impart to an- 
other is, in a limited sense, a revelation, and if 
he has been successful in imparting it he has 
also been natural. No outside or unusual force 
is necessary to reveal the idea. If the one for 

i "Revelation and Scripture come to be for us prac- 
tically synonymous and co-extensive." — James Orr: 
Revelation and Inspiration, p. 21. See also, Revela- 
tion and Inspiration by Reinhold Seeberg (Eng. tr.). 
Neither of these books came to my attention until my 
own was in print. They are scholarly and eminently 
sane discussions, but seem to confuse rather than clarify 
the idea of revelation when they hold that, on the theory 
of progressive or natural revelation, "Christ" is rele- 
gated as "only one in the series of leading minds who 
have disclosed Divine thoughts to man." (Seeberg, 119 
f., cf. p. 44.) 

v 



vi PREFACE 

whom the revelation is intended cannot receive 
it on his own account, no kind or amount of 
extraneous effort would make him receptive. 
Here is the burden of the whole matter. The 
ability to receive a revelation must be in evi- 
dence as much as the capability to dis- 
close a truth. The deaf man cannot hear music, 
however sweet or loud the strain may be. His 
ears must be first uncovered. So the proffer 
of a revelation is only one side of it; there 
must also be a receiving side. 

The moral sense is so quick and responsive 
that men have declared our knowledge of good 
and evil to be the result of "direct revelation." 
But however the truth is revealed, the revela- 
tion must be worked out by him who would profit 
thereby. As there have been occasions and op- 
portunities for receiving revelation and men 
prepared at those times to receive it, it would 
look as though the mind of the Eternal had been 
disclosed once for all during a certain period 
of time. Now some truths have come to us with 
the marks of finality upon them and the book 
of revelation, so far as they are concerned, has 
been closed. At least so it would appear to the 
finite mind. 

Among such truths are the Copernican sys- 
tem of astronomy, the law of gravity, and per- 
haps the law of the conservation of energy. 
So in the Bible there are truths revealed which 



PREFACE vii 

in their essence seem to be final. But the final- 
ity of such truths is not a confining force 
which would limit and narrow them, but an ex- 
pansive power which makes them appreciable by 
all people and applicable to all times. The dis- 
coveries of Copernicus did not fence in the heav- 
ens but, in fact, took all, barriers away. The 
truths which the prophets preached and Jesus 
proclaimed do not close the Bible but rather 
throw it wide open. Man must work out every 
truth declared to him or which he approximates 
on his own account before it can be a revelation 
to him. We would not underestimate the forces 
outside of man which make his conception of 
truth possible. That there is a power working 
in him to make truth known is the only explana- 
tion we have for the wonderful feats man has 
accomplished in grasping truth. But we must 
hold clearly in mind man's necessary activity in 
the reception of truth. Revelation, in its prac- 
tical or intelligible result, is the working out by 
man of the truth God would work in. 2 

In the following discussion I have endeavored 

2 This "formula" (Phil. 2:19-13) is set forth as "the 
mandate of evolution" by Francis Howe Johnson in 
his recent book, "God in Evolution," (p. 145), a man- 
date which forces one to consider "the living, never- 
ceasing stream of influences that work within and 
without us." Mr. Johnson's noteworthy book first came 
into my hands as I was reading the page-proof of 
my own manuscript. 



viii PREFACE 

to show first, the necessity of revelation because 
of the nature both of God and man; second, 
the conditions under which it must be received ; 
and last, its record in various living and imper- 
ishable forms. I have used the noun "record" 
in a very wide sense, meaning any evidence 
whatsoever, direct or indirect, written or un- 
written, seen or unseen, material or spiritual, 
by which we can argue for the presence of God 
in nature, in man, and in the ongoing of the 
world. Quotations from various authorities 
are made, not to bolster up my own argument 
particularly, but to show that many minds in 
widely different fields have come to substantial 
agreement on the fundamentals of thought and 
life. This in itself is evidence to me of a sin- 
gle source and a unifying power of revelation. 

William W. Guth. 

San Jose, California. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Idea of Revelation ... 1 

II The Nature of Revelation . . 17 

III The Object of Revelation . . 35 

IV Conditions of Receiving Revela- 

tion 51 

V Revelation and Inspiration . . 67 
VI The Distinction Between Reve- 
lation and its Record ... 85 
VII The Record of Revelation in 

Nature 105 

VIII The Record of Revelation in 

Human Life 127 

IX The Record of Revelation in 

History . . . . . . . 149 

X The Record of Revelation in 

Music and the Fine Arts . . 173 
XI The Record of Revelation in 

Profane Literature . . . 195 
" XII The Record of Revelation in 

Holy Writ 215 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 

"If belief makes the mind keener, if belief makes the 
heart more willing to bear the cross of self-sacrifice, if 
belief unlocks powers of the will hitherto unsuspected, 
we shall hold that the belief itself is an evidence of the 
unseen to which it points." — Francis J. McConnell. 

There is an incentive of the Unseen. Man 
has a feeling that he can know the unknowable. 
Ages ago a Hebrew poet voiced a universal fact 
when he sang in firm confidence: "This is the 
generation of them that seek Him; that seek 
thy face, O Jacob." * Every generation has 
been and is a God-seeking one. The note of 
the psalmist to-day, weaving into his hymn the 
warp and the woof of the soul's confidence, is 
no less certain and reassuring than that of the 
psalmist yesterday. This day, to-day, is the 
generation of them that seek Him, that seek 
His face. We stand at the seashore and watch 
the waves break and seemingly come to naught 
on the sands. But behind the waves is the full 
ocean rolling on and on in its landward stride. 

i Psalm 24:6. 



% REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

And so rolls on and ever the vast deep of the 
soul's consciousness reaching out toward the 
land, toward a firm resting ground, in its search 
after God. Although individual generations 
may have become as weary as the waves, and as 
hopeless, beyond were the heaving and throb- 
bing generations, pushing on toward the same 
shore, untiring in the same quest. As long as 
water fills the ocean and a single human desire 
remains, will this quest go on. 

Men seek God because they are dependent 
upon the elements of nature and the wills of 
other men. These are too strong for them, 
often, or too vacillating. They would relate 
themselves to some one supreme, central, gov- 
erning power to which they can surrender them- 
selves in confidence. Not even the heroic in 
daring and the strong in originality can meet 
the perplexities of life out of their own re- 
sources. They, too, seek God because there are 
tempests in their souls they would have stilled, 
because there is a peace they have intimations 
of and an unsinking ground for hope. 

Men seek God on the same basis that they 
seek anything else worth while. They are actu- 
ated in reaching after the Unseen in like manner 
as are men who uncover the earth for gold. In 
any serious search for real values there is not 
nearly so much chance as often appears. Men 
seek gold where they believe it can be found. 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 3 

We often read of buried treasure, of an island 
where a pirate's gold has been secreted, or a 
latitude and longitude where a Captain Kidd's 
ship, weighted to the gunwales, has gone down. 
These stories are found in books written for 
children, making an appeal, also, to the healthy 
child-spirit of a fullgrown man. They are 
fascinating. But they do not lead a man to 
leave the serious pursuits of life and chase after 
a rainbow. In the mountainous regions of the 
extreme west of our land the case is different. 
Serious and earnest minded men are there in 
search for gold. They are not the chance pros- 
pectors of the days of '49 when gold could be 
picked up in the placers of California and Ne- 
vada. They are men, many of them, trained 
in schools of mining, all of them by practical 
experience. They are competent to push their 
pursuit after the precious metals. They have 
a very high percentage of actual knowledge 
and, hence, a large measure of success. They 
know the nature of the soil out of which gold 
has come, they know the configuration of the 
gold-bearing mountains, they make inferences 
and draw conclusions and act upon them. And 
they are usually right. 

So men seek after God. Because they be- 
lieve He has been found in ages past, succeeding 
generations seek Him. If Moses and David 
knew Him there is no reason why Cromwell or 



4 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Stonewall Jackson should not have known Him. 
The faith of all these men was strong in the ex- 
istence of God and in His guiding hand. If 
the first two were rebellious and disobedient in 
the practice of their faith and the last two 
harsh and forbidding in the construction of their 
faith, their contemporaries, nevertheless, be- 
lieved that they not only had glimpses, but now 
and then whole views, of the Infinite and His 
character. God was a dominant force in their 
lives and history will not read His influence 
out of their careers. 

To push our mining illustration a little fur- 
ther, the prospector after God has found out- 
croppings of His presence in every hill and val- 
ley of human life. This fact leads men to infer 
that knowledge of God can be mined; that the 
ore of His presence can be brought up by spir- 
itual and mental effort, that it can be assayed 
and minted and stamped with the image of His 
likeness and given currency in the intercourse 
of men. The God-miner is not on as certain 
ground as the gold-miner. But his method is 
equally valid, and, in its own sphere, just as 
productive of wished-for results. The evi- 
dences which reward his search are intimations 
of deeper underlying facts. His practical faith 
leads him to meditate on the things of God and 
his meditations issue in living tests of his faith. 
He can 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 5 

. . . "dimly guess, from blessings known 
Of greater out of sight." 2 

He will not be discouraged when some ask him 
for his proofs of God's existence. He can dis- 
pense with conventional proofs. The proofs he 
has have an inherent energy and enable him to 
leap to God. There are arguments, in the na- 
ture of analogies, that satisfy him. He will 
point, for example, to the fact that astrono- 
mers, many years ago, were very much disturbed 
whenever they observed the planet Uranus, be- 
cause at one point in its track it curved out- 
ward from its true orbit. Here was a fact 
without a known cause or explanation. It led 
to a faith which was the evidence of things not 
seen. For two mathematicians, unknown to 
each other, began to work out the problem. 
They na( ^ definite data on which to proceed : the 
law of gravity, the relation of number, the per- 
fectness of a curve or an orbit. Gradually each 
scholar moved up to one point. Some entirely 
unknown mass of attractive power was drawing 
Uranus out of his course. They calculated the 
distance across millions of leagues of space, they 
estimated the weight of the disturbing body, 
they designated the place where it must be 
found. The telescopes were turned on the spot. 
No disturbing element was to be seen. But it 

2 John Greenleaf Whittier: The Eternal Goodness. 



6 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

must be there, said the one mathematician. It 
must be there, said the other. So convincing 
was the proof that astronomy thereafter took 
cognizance of the declaration. And one day a 
lens, stronger than any theretofore ground, 
was fitted to a telescope and turned on the spot, 
and the disturbing body, a planet, now called 
Neptune, was seen. Here the faith of the scien- 
tist, who, it is so often declared, spurns faith 
and moves by sight alone, caused him to walk 
steadily onward without seeing until the day 
came when the veil was lifted, and he saw. 

While man has no telescope with which to 
see God and never expects to look upon Him 
with the physical eye, he has as strong reasons 
for believing He exists as those the astronomers 
had for the existence of the unseen planet. His 
faith becomes the substance of things hoped 
for. It leads him to study his fellow-man with 
patience and to note that in his course he is in- 
flected upward. On the basis of human knowl- 
edge, human experience, human desires, human 
love, he works out the reason for this upward 
tendency. He affirms the existence of a power 
that draws steadily upward, and, with faith 
equal to that of the scientist, argues that God 
exists. He cannot see Him, but he believes he 
feels Him. Some day, as he hopes, the veil 
here will be withdrawn and he will see God as 
He is. 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 7 

But some will object that this is merely an 
emotional impulse and not to be likened to a 
miner seeking gold or a mathematician verify- 
ing an hypothesis. We have handled and used 
gold, we have looked upon and fixed the char- 
acter of Neptune. But who has seen God at 
any time or who has heard Him speak? These 
arguments seem to have force, but men disre- 
gard them. For, in spite of all logic to the 
contrary, God is a reality to them. They have 
eyes to see in the world of the spiritual what 
they cannot prove in the world of the material. 
Why this is so they do not know. Here is a 
development they cannot follow in the process 
but which they know in the result. The only 
process they can be aware of is obedience to 
their spiritual impulse. And this spiritual im- 
pulse is stirred by the hope which "springs eter- 
nal in the human breast." 

Of course it is not following the scientific 
method to offer one's hope as a proof of any 
fact, especially so monumental a fact as the ex- 
istence of God. But it is psychological. For 
all healthy life proceeds on the basis of hope. 
In the mental and moral and physical life, prog- 
ress and impetus are dependent upon hope. 
Hope means steadfastness, constancy, endur- 
ance, opposition to cowardice or despondency. 
The brave man, the enthusiastic, the energetic, 



8 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

the ambitious man, the man in whose veins the 
blood runs pure and free, is hopeful. 

We cannot weigh hope as we can gold or use 
it as a medium of exchange in the commercial 
world. Rut it is ponderable, nevertheless, and 
has a current value in the affairs of men far 
greater than the intrinsic worth of any number 
of coins. For hope is the mother of belief. 
And without belief, life is impossible. A man 
may discard the traditional beliefs of religion, 
philosophy, art, science, politics, but he will re- 
main a believing creature. 

Relieving implies a desire to reach the truth. 
As the eye turns to light rather than darkness, 
so the mind turns to truth rather than error. 
A normal, healthy, well developed man would 
rather believe good of another than evil. So 
he believes that at the basis of society, and un- 
derlying all the phenomena which his eye can 
see and his mind can grasp, there is an essential 
goodness, a fundamental trueness. He cannot 
really make himself believe that society is bad 
and irredeemable, that the world, as we are able 
to understand it, has neither order nor purpose- 
ful direction, that it is rushing along as an 
engine without a driver or a ship without a 
rudder. He believes in the true and the good 
because truth and goodness build up and estab- 
lish. He has no use for the man who merely 
tears down. He frowns upon him in the moral 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 9 

and intellectual world just as in the physical. 
He will tolerate him only when he can build a 
better structure than the one he would pull 
down. There have been but few men who have 
been willing- to abandon themselves to despair. 
The most pessimistic and soul-harrowing 
thoughts in the writings of men who have looked 
only upon the dark side of life are modified by 
other passages or denied by their conduct in 
the daily affairs of life. 3 Men look before 
they take a leap into the dark, and after 
looking, the chances are they will do nothing 
rash. 

Man believes truth is at the center because 
men widely separated, with no means of inter- 
communication, have reached exactly the same 
thoughts and have expressed them in similar 
phraseology. Great minds run in the same chan- 
nel, and so do lesser minds, because the chan- 
nel leads to the truth and all counter-streams 
must sooner or later empty into it or dissipate 
in the sands. It is not surprising, therefore, 
that practically all religions, however widely 
separated the races and cults may be, have a 
similarity in their main features. The most 
primitive, as well as the most highly developed 

s "I have noticed, during years of self-observation, 
that it is not in hours of clearness and vigor that this 
doctrine [of material atheism] commends itself to my 
mind." — Tyndall. 



10 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

faiths, have doctrines of incarnation, of sacrifice 
and sacraments, of renunciation, of resurrection 
and judgment. The followers of Mithras, the 
god of light in the ancient Persian mythology, 
had a religion so closely bordering upon that of 
the Christian that some scholars are claiming 
Christianity was borrowed from Persia. But 
there is a deeper fact underlying here, namely 
that all minds, whether they be heathen, pagan, 
or Christian, in their search for the truth, will 
go in the same direction. All will not go 
equally far. History shows us that some peo- 
ples have gone farther in their search after 
truth than others, and that some minds among 
the same peoples have outdistanced their fel- 
lows. But whosoever seeks to understand fun- 
damental reality will have a certain trend just 
as surely as the vine in the cellar will grow to- 
ward the window. 

Without earnest convictions nothing large or 
sound is possible. All great ages have been 
ages of sincere belief. The age of Rousseau, 
for example, was an age flippant and superfi- 
cial in its beliefs. We do not turn particularly 
to Rousseau or to his French contemporaries 
for noble, inspiring, or directive thought. 
Their age is not one of the great constructive 
epochs in the history of civilization. The age 
of Dante, on the other hand, was an age of 
earnest belief and consequently one of the nota- 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 11 

ble stages in the development of the human race. 
"In Dante's time learning had something of a 
sacred character." For this Dante was largely 
responsible. His "whole nature," says Lowell, 
"was one of intense belief. There is proof upon 
proof that he believed himself invested with a 
divine mission. Like the Hebrew prophets, with 
whose writings his whole soul was imbued, it was 
back to the old worship and the God of his 
Fathers that he called his people." 4 So the 
intensity of his belief molded and shaped the 
beliefs of his contemporaries and of the masses. 
We cannot accept all that he believed, but we 
do not enter the fog or the miasma of the 
swamp when we walk or leisurely stroll through 
the pages of his writings. 

That men believe in goodness rather than evil, 
that they prefer the light to darkness, that 
truth, as they experience it, is constructive and 
guiding, while error, as they know it, is de- 
structive and misleading, are commonplaces of 
every day life. They are underneath the as- 
sumption of the untutored mind that infinite 
goodness, light, and truth somewhere and some- 
how exist. Belief thus becomes mixed with 
trust and eventuates in faith. They also lead 
the thoughtful mind to go behind them and give 
a reason for the faith which they inspire. 

* Complete Works, Vol. 4, p. 160. 



12 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Even those who declare that we cannot get 
back of the appearances and phenomena of life 
are forced, as Herbert Spencer was, to posit an 
Unknowable and to admit that the likenesses 
and changes among things, as they appear to 
us, must have resemblances to fundamental re- 
ality itself. This is but a step to the unspecu- 
lative thought which assumes that funda- 
mental reality is a personal Being ; and that the 
virtues which are imperfect and incomplete in 
man must be full and perfect in Him. And 
strange as it may seem, this assumption of un- 
speculative thought is the material which the 
greatest minds of all ages have worked over in 
the crucible of their intellects, bringing out a 
product which does not differ in essence, but 
only in form and expression, from the clinging 
faith of simplicity. This is the incentive of 
the Unseen, tugging at the hearts of those who 
are not capable of reflective and continued 
thought, and rousing the intellectual suscepti- 
bilities and capacities of those who are capable, 
not failing in the end to enlist also their emo- 
tional and volitional faculties. Therefore, all 
men seek God. As the hart panteth after the 
water-brooks, so pant the souls of men after 
God. They cannot get along without Him, and 
the very thought of their dependence upon Him 
implies an ability and a willingness on His part 
to help them. Did He not speak to them and 



THE IDEA OF REVELATION 13 

could they not hear and understand Him, He 
would be of no possible use to them. 

These assumptions of faith underlie the con- 
viction that man can know God. They make a 
revelation of God to man not only desirable, but 
highly probable. Man cannot rest in any 
thought short of a capability and willingness 
on the part of God to reveal Himself to man. 
While he would not be bold enough to declare 
that God must or must not do this or that, yet 
he finds the whole conception of God baseless if 
He have neither the power nor the inclination 
to communicate His mind and will to man. 
What the nature of such revelation is needs to 
be inquired into, but that God has revealed and 
will continue to reveal Himself, men verily be- 
lieve. 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION 



II 

THE NATURE OF REVELATION 

"If we will not admit the possibility of a God speak- 
ing to us, it is equivalent to saying, 'If there were a 
God, by no possibility through endless ages could he 
speak with the men he has created;' and by such a con- 
clusion we make any conceivable God weaker than we 
ourselves."' — Eleanor Harris Rowland. 

Knowledge has its beginning in a venture of 
faith. We do not come to faith through sci- 
ence, but to science through faith. We under- 
take to give reasons for our beliefs rather than 
hold beliefs because of our reasons. Beliefs 
originate in the spiritual being of man ; reasons 
issue from his mental being. The belief will have 
a birth uncaused by him ; the reason will have a 
development through his conscious effort. The 
one is raw material, the other a structure. 

"Any fact which gives knowledge," we are 
told, "is a revelation." x But we must be care- 
ful to interpret the word "give" in the sense of 
presenting the material out of which knowl- 

i Henry Melvill Gwatkin : The Knowledge of God, 
Vol. I, p. 5. 

17 



18 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

edge can be made. For knowledge does not 
come without effort on our part. There must 
be a conscious reaction of the mind against the 
material which is given us for thought. There 
can be no knowledge without a mind capable of 
receiving the revelation and fixing it as knowl- 
edge. What is given is really the impact of 
suggestion. What is received is the impulse to 
work out the suggestion. The working out will 
be partial and unsatisfactory. No man can 
fully express himself. There is always some- 
thing backlying. Knowledge is thus only an 
approximation. We see in part and cannot 
produce more than we see. But the part leads 
on irresistibly to the whole. Man projects the 
whole even although he feels he cannot realize it. 
He has a presentiment of the whole. He be- 
lieves somewhere, in some mind, truth is whole 
and comprehensive. So he makes a venture of 
his faith and progresses, as he believes, toward 
knowledge. He projects an infinite Mind. He 
sees, he feels, reality about him. He would 
lead this reality back to a primary and ultimate 
Reality. Reality in his mind pushes him back 
to the mind of Reality. He has, therefore, a 
stimulus for his faith. Vague and intangible 
though it may be, there is a force which stirs 
him to faith as surely as the wind bulges the 
sail. And he can guide his belief as the ship- 
man can turn his prow. There are no paths 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION 19 

before him, but he is no more on a trackless sea 
than is the mariner. His faith is the star that 
leads him on. 

Now what is the stimulus of his faith? Dar- 
win was frequently asked for his religious opin- 
ions. He wrote many letters giving his views 
on fundamental questions. He was exceedingly 
cautious in all his statements. 2 But in one 
letter, at least, he committed himself to the very 
thing he was doubtful about. He was writing 
to a Dutch student in 1873. After referring to 
the extreme improbability of "this grand and 
wondrous universe, including our conscious 
selves" having arisen "through chance," and 
saying that "to a certain extent" he deferred 
"to the judgment of the many able men who 
have fully believed in God," he closed with the 
sentence: "The safest conclusion seems to me 
that the whole subject is beyond the scope of 
man's intellect; but man can do his duty." 3 

2 "The habit of scientific research makes a man cau- 
tious in admitting evidence." Letter to a German stu- 
dent, 1879. Life and Letters. Edited by his son, Fran- 
cis Darwin, Vol. I, p. 277. 

s Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 276. The italics are 
ours. Compare this statement with the conclusion of 
Borden P. Bowne. "Technically, of course, our faith 
does not admit of demonstration; neither does any other 
faith or unfaith. But it does admit of being lived; and 
when it is lived, our souls see that it is good, and we 
are satisfied that it is Divine." Gains for Religious 
Thought in the Last Generation, Hibbert Journal, July, 
1910, p. 893. 



20 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Here is the real heart of the matter. What 
is man's duty? To whom is he duty-bound? 
How is he able to do his duty? Why does he 
want to do his duty? These questions go 
deeper than man's intellect. When the noted 
scientist said, "but man can do his duty," he 
gave evidence of a conviction not based on 
knowledge. This conviction, in spite of him- 
self, led him to feel he was duty-bound, and to 
believe that he could fulfill the obligation. He 
felt instinctively a dependence, and that de- 
pendence was on a power beyond the scope of 
man's intellect. Even although he was "aware 
that if we admit a first cause, the mind still 
craves to know whence it came and how it 
arose," yet something in him told him he was 
under obligation to something, seemingly, with- 
out him and that he ought so to conduct him- 
self that his life would be in harmony with this 
"something." 

This is an experience many men have. In 
fact it is of so frequent an occurrence that we 
are warranted in saying it is an experience com- 
mon to all men. Psychologists as well as reli- 
gionists have studied this "something" and have 
found it is not without, but within; that it is 
an instinctive tendency which man develops 
morally and philosophically. This tendency is 
described as the religious in man. It is the 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION 21 

foundation of all religions. We are not here in 
the region of hypothesis, but in that of history. 
The records of historical research fix the fact 
that man, always and everywhere, has been 
moved by a tendency which sooner or later is- 
sued in religious belief. Whatever the theories 
as to the origin and cause of this religious 
tendency, the fact stubbornly remains that man 
innately or intuitively is religious. No philoso- 
phy has been able to create a religion ; and no 
psychology has been able to find the phenomena 
of the religious elsewhere except in man. It 
is not an outward influence, but an inward en- 
ergy. Man does not acquire it, he is born with 
it. The center and circumference of religion 
and of religious instinct man has found in the 
Being whom, with the concensus of the world's 
opinion, we call God. 

Such a fact should lead thoughtful men to 
consider not whether there is a God, but how are 
we to think of God. The tendency, of course, 
is to think of Him in human terms and we are 
quite apt to create Him in our own image. To 
impart to Him the characteristics and attributes 
of man is to make Him a tenuous abstraction. 
Hence Haeckel's scoff at Diety as a "gaseous 
vertebrate." But can we think differently of 
God? "Anthropomorphism in some degree is 
inevitable, because each man must think in terms 



22 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

of his own experience. Into his own personal 
universe, all that he knows must come." 4 Sci- 
ence must speak of nature in human terms just 
as well as philosophy must think of God in 
human terms. There is no term the scientist 
can use which is not a formula of the human 
mind. The terms force and cause applied to 
nature and the ongoing of things are just as 
much derived from human experience as the 
terms mind and heart applied to God. "Modify 
them as you may, all causal conceptions are 
born from within, as reflections or reductions 
of our personal, animal, or physical activity: 
and the severest science is, in this sense, just 
as anthropomorphic as the most ideal the- 
ology." 5 

And yet we are told that the idea of God 
cannot be anthropomorphic, and appeal to the 
thoughtful man. A crude anthropomorphism 
that would attach to the Divine Being the lim- 
itations of human kind, we cannot, of 
course, defend. But may we not move out 
from the idea of God imaged in the form 
of man to the idea of God thought of 

* David Starr Jordan: Stability of Truth, p. 163. 

6 Martineau: A Study of Religion, Vol. I, p. 336. For 
a number of quotations on anthropomorphism see Note 
2 to Lecture I, Illingworth: Personality, Human and 
Divine, pp. 219-232. See also George A. Gordon: The 
Christ of T6-day, p. 86, and The New Epoch for Faith, 
p. 265. 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION 23 

essentially as spirit like man? Can we not 
say that as the real man is spirit the real God 
also must be? Of course Jesus has told us that 
God is a spirit. But he added, they who wor- 
ship Him can worship Him only in spirit. We 
know nothing of spirit except human spirit. In- 
deed, we can be sure in our knowledge of only a 
very little of this. But the human spirit we do 
know has sufficient marks and characteristics to 
lead us to believe that it must have a likeness 
to another spirit from which it derives its power 
and in which it finds its fullness. If the ancients, 
or even our fathers, were guilty of thinking 
about God in a crude anthropomorphism, this 
is no reason why we should stop thinking about 
God in the only way and with the only means 
possible. Our task is to purify our thought ; 
to bring our ideas of God into perfect har- 
mony with the best we have been able to realize 
in human life and with our highest ideals. 

When man thinks of anything really worth 
while he thinks of something noble rather than 
base, something high rather than low. He is 
conscious of a spiritual impulse which pushes 
him upward. He has ideas of a great unknown 
where life is richer, better, more real. A heaven 
is projected, and a Lord of all. This Lord of 
all must be good, He must be holy, He must be 
loving. Hence He must be a self, a personality, 
and He must have moral relation to those who 



£4 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

aspire to reach or know Him. This is a crude 
thought of God. But it is the thought of 
countless intelligent people. They are not able 
to formulate their thought according to the 
rules of logic. They are hard put to it to give 
a reason for their belief in God. But they do 
believe in Him ; and what is vastly of more con- 
sequence, they live, or want to live, as though 
He existed. They are not very far removed, 
after all, from the scientist who could not 
formulate a satisfactory reason for the exist- 
ence of God, but who nevertheless said, "man 
can do his duty." Men want to be in right rela- 
tions with the being whom they call God. And 
this fact, as stubborn a fact as we find in the 
whole human realm, gives warrant, if not valid- 
ity, for the presuppositions, crude as some of 
them are, for the existence of God. 

Now we cannot think of God apart from per- 
sonality. Although much vagueness, and even 
doubt, exists as to the meaning of the term, 6 
we need not lose ourselves here in abstractions. 
"The principle of personality is a positive and 
fertile principle." It is "one of the most fertile 
principles which has ever been able to establish 
itself." 7 We sense its meaning because we 

s "Whatever the Power be that sustains the world, we 
cannot conceive it to be a person even if we knew what 
a person meant." G. Lowe Dickinson: Knowledge and 
Faith, Hibbert Journal, April, 1908, p. 521. 

7 Harold Hoffding: The Philosophy of Religion, pp. 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION 25 

cannot understand anything in this world 
except through the medium of the think- 
ing, feeling, willing self. 8 This is person- 
ality. The soul of nature means nothing if we 
can think of nature only on the basis of mechan- 
ism with no personal directing power. The 
soul of man is nothing but a term if it begins 
and ends in itself and has no relation to other 
souls or to the one Soul. Men trust nature, 
else they would not till the ground and sow; 
they trust men, else they would not venture on 
social or business relations ; they trust God, else 
they could not hold to the trustworthiness of 
nature and man. Such words as trust and 
trustworthiness imply personality, and the 
heart of the implication has a moral significance. 
The moral relation implies not only activity 
actuated by moral motives, but for moral ends. 
Hence, a moral universe and a community of 
human beings who can be moral. Hence, also, 
a communion between God and man, a giving 
and a receiving, an asking and an answering. 
In the very nature of things, therefore, God 

315-316. See also a most instructive discussion of the 
whole subject by John Wright Buckham: Personality 
and the Christian Ideal. 

s "The self itself as the subject of the mental life 
and knowing and experiencing itself as living, and as 
one and the same throughout its changing experiences, 
is the surest item of knowledge we possess." Borden 
P. Bowne: Personalism, p. 88. 



26 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

not only must reveal Himself to man, but must 
give Himself in all worthiness and dignity to 
man. 

It is impossible for man to hold anything 
good to himself and for himself. In spite of 
his naturally selfish disposition, in order really 
to derive benefit from his possession, he must 
share it with others. A thought can mean noth- 
ing to us unless we impart it to others. This 
must be true even of God. So the goodness of 
God is meaningless unless man through God's vo- 
lition can share in it. "One thing, and only one, 
we can safely say God must do: He must act 
according to His own nature." 9 If we believe 
that God is good, that He holds moral relations 
to man as well as the universe, of which man is 
a part, we must hold that God is under obliga- 
tion to make that goodness and that moral re- 
lation known to man so that man can benefit 
therefrom. 

As man thus becomes the object of the revela- 
tion, it is valid to assume that God will adapt 
Himself to man. Living matter is "educable" 
matter. 10 "It is matter selected and put into a 
course of training; it will profit by experi- 
ence." X1 If this is true of living matter in the 
lower forms, it surely must be true of living 

sGwatkin: The Knowledge of God, Vol. I, p. 135. 

10 Nathaniel S. Shaler: The Individual, p. 22 f. 

n Newman Smythe : Through Science to Faith, p. 19. 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION Tl 

matter in the highest form. Unless man is an 
end in himself, he is subject to training. In 
the lower stages of his development we know he 
must undergo a process of training. This does 
not end when he reaches maturity. As he finds 
unoccupied fields in all ranges of knowledge he 
would like to possess, so also is he conscious of 
his inability to possess them. He would profit 
by experience. He gives himself to study in 
new realms even when, like Cato, he has reached 
the age of fourscore. Always and ever he hears 
voices declaring that much remains to be said to 
him, but that he is not yet able to bear it. Fi- 
nality nowhere has been reached. The things 
we see clearly only lead us to the edge of dark- 
ness whose depth we cannot determine. Our 
little candle makes the night more real. But 
we push on. What light we have penetrates 
the gloom, we can see our way and in some 
places can touch the current that floods our 
standing place with light. Gradually, grop- 
ingly, man advances. If he were not drawn 
onward he would stop in his tracks. But like 
the explorer he hears a voice ringing 

. . "interminable changes 
On one everlasting whisper day and night re- 
peated — so : 
'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look 
behind the Ranges — 



28 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and wait- 
ing for you. Go !' " 12 

Gradually and progressively man has 
moved. He has received revelation not as 
though there were only so much of it and it was 
handed out bit by bit until all was gone, but as 
though each bit was part of an inexhaustible 
store and was a little more complex and com- 
prehensive than the last. In our human efforts 
at education we labor gradually and progress- 
ively, adapting the lesson to the learner. We 
cannot believe that God in His education of 
man would use less carefully thought out and 
serviceable methods. We cannot conceive of 
Him being haphazard where man exercises 
choice, or unmindful of an end where man, so far 
as his intelligence and experience go, takes each 
step with a definite purpose in view. If man 
must work according to the rule that two and 
two make four and that the whole is equal to 
its parts, God must work in the same way. For 
He is dealing, not with His equals, but with 
finite men who cannot find themselves in chaos 
but must be led by rule into order. Difficulties, 
of course, will arise. They will not inhere in 
the revelation, however, but grow out of man's 
unpreparedness. A simple axiom in geometry 

12 Rudyard Kipling: The Explorer, Collected Verse, 
p. 19. 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION 29 

will puzzle a pupil in the primary grade but 
ought not to present any difficulties to a high 
school student. Revelation will not settle all 
intellectual difficulties for some men, nor will it 
settle some intellectual difficulties for all men. 
If it did, it would not be revelation and there 
could be no intellectual endeavor. In general, 
revelation will be intellectually clearing because 
in essence it will be simple and adapted to its 
subject. 

Revelation, therefore, will not be limited to a 
particular time nor adapted only to a certain 
people. It will be received in time by particular 
individuals. But its scope must be timeless and 
extra-individual. The word of God must have 
had the same meaning for the first thinking 
man as it has for the thinking man to-day. 
The latter will get more out of it. But this is 
not because there was less revelation which the 
former might have had, but because the thinker 
of to-day can appropriate more of it than his 
earlier brother could. He takes revelation not 
only through the experience of the race, but 
through a larger range of subjects and pur- 
poses in the light of which revelation is to be 
interpreted. Man has heard God's voice at 
divers times and in various ways. The revela- 
tion, as we understand it, always has had refer- 
ence to the progress of the race and the readi- 
ness of the individual man. 



30 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

But as we assume God to be One and Un- 
changeable, so must we regard His truth. In 
this sense His revelation has been full and com- 
plete, man's knowledge of it partial and received 
by defined stages. A fullness of time must come 
before man can see through the further pur- 
poses of God which existed from the beginning. 
And we must assume that God will use certain 
means of leading man to see His truth. But 
we cannot suppose truth grows with God, as it 
does with man. God is the truth. In ways best 
known to Him He gives Himself so that man can 
appropriate more and more of Him. In nowise 
could He limit Himself to a particular time or to 
a particular way of revealing Himself. Such a 
question as the revelation of God to so-called 
heathen peoples cannot arise when we consider 
that, from the beginning, God has been reveal- 
ing Himself. We find His presence in the liter- 
ature and the life of peoples who lived ages be- 
fore the patriarchs of the Old Testament. And 
we need not be surprised when the literature of 
such peoples shows a deep insight into the being 
and purpose of God. For if God loves his chil- 
dren, we must assume that He has loved them 
from the very beginning, and not that He per- 
mitted the race to begin and grow for a long 
period of years before He turned His kindly 
countenance upon it and reached down His arms 
to take it into a loving embrace. God revealed 



THE NATURE OF REVELATION 31 

Himself long before the first child of Israel was 
born. Nay, we must even go further and say 
that God was in readiness to reveal Himself 
before any son of man was born. We read 
that "the heavens declare the glory of God 
and the firmament showeth His handiwork." 
Man discovered this fact. As he contemplated 
it he was lost in wonder and praise. But he 
only discovered the fact. It existed long be- 
fore he was born, and shows God's evident pur- 
pose in revealing Himself to man. He left His 
mark on the rocks in the hills, on the stars in 
the heavens, on the waters of the deep, all for 
the purpose of making Himself known to man. 
Revelation, with man as its object, will also be 
moral and livable. We may say it will be ethical 
and not metaphysical. It will have to do with 
the practical ; not with the theoretical phases of 
life. We cannot see or know the sun except as 
we have certain indications concerning it. Men 
believe it exists and that it gives light and heat. 
But the sun itself we cannot know. So, meta- 
physically speaking, we cannot know God. He 
does not reveal His actual self to us. But men 
believe He exists. As they live by appropriat- 
ing the light and heat of the sun, so do they 
think they find life in God by living the truth 
which they believe He reveals. This faith has 
a satisfying content. Men know error is not 
livable. They base their actions on what they 



32 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

know to be true and dependable, even although 
they have a very little amount of truth. As this 
tendency of man finds its cause in God, we as- 
sume that God's impartation of Himself is moral 
and ethical. Men take it to be so and feed upon 
Him. And the result of their nourishment is a 
healthful, ruddy, wholesouled life which means 
soundness and sanity. It also means not only a 
desire to be good, but a large amount of good- 
ness actually achieved. If the truth of God in 
its expression to man has a spiritualizing ef- 
fect, we can dispense with the formal rules of 
logic in trying to ascertain His nature. We 
can look at the countless lives which have fed 
on this belief of His moral and ethical nature 
and have assurance of the kind of Being He 
must be. We can regard metaphysics as the 
theory of God's being and ethics as the fact 
thereof. The one would be theoretical, the other 
practical. Only the moral and ethical revela- 
tion of God would be livable. And if man could 
not live the truth of God it would have no value 
for anyone but God. To think of God shut up 
to His own truth is impossible. 

Revelation is the unfolding of God to man. 
It has meaning for man only as he makes effort 
to understand it. It is adapted to man's capaci- 
ties. It is gradual, progressive, timeless, uni- 
versal, moral and livable. 



THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 



Ill 

THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 

"Man's life now, as of old, is the genuine work of 
God; wherever there is a man, a God also is revealed, 
and all that is godlike; a whole epitome of the Infinite, 
with its meanings, lies enfolded in the life of every 
man." — Carlyle. 

As man is the object of revelation it may be 
well to consider Job's question of old: "What is 
man that thou shouldest magnify him, and that 
thou shouldest set thy mind upon him?" The 
chemist and the zoologist both have an answer 
to the question, what is man? The one reduces 
him to his chemical compounds ; the other classi- 
fies him in the animal world. But we go neither 
to the chemist nor to the zoologist for an answer 
to the question. What do so many pounds of 
carbon or lime, so many ounces of sodium or 
iron or potassium or magnesium or silican, so 
many cubic feet of oxygen and hydrogen and 
nitrogen mean to us? Or how much wiser are 
we when we are told that man is a featherless, 
plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus homo? 
Carbon is not conscious, lime cannot think, 
phosphorus does not suffer. Neither does the 
35 



36 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

animal kingdom as we commonly understand 
that term supply any analogy from which we 
could deduce our idea of man. He resembles 
the body of lower animals, speaking in the 
most general terms, and is properly classed 
among them ; he is controlled by the common 
laws of physical and chemical action, he is ma- 
terial in a vital and important sense. But he 
is so differentiated from the material that when 
we speak of man we unconsciously leave the 
material out of consideration. We look not to 
his body ; we look for the man behind the ex- 
terior form. He manifests himself to us in 
action, and only by the nature of his action 
can we tell what he is. 

Man thinks and feels, he knows and remem- 
bers, he imagines, reasons, judges. From these 
activities we infer an intellect. Furthermore 
man experiences mental pain or pleasure ; he 
enjoys, he suffers, he loves, he hates, he is sen- 
sible to outward and inner conditions not only 
as regards himself, but also in relation to 
others. Herein we may find his likeness to 
other animals, for all of them are subject to 
heat and cold and weariness, they understand 
their own kind and are able to communicate 
with each other; while some of them remem- 
ber, show moods of joy and despondency, at- 
tain to a certain sense of fidelity and exhibit 
a degree of shame for wrongdoing. But the 



THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 37 

analogy cannot be carried further than this. 
They are rightly called dumb animals because 
so far as anyone has as yet been able to dis- 
cover, they have no reflective consciousness as 
man has, they are not capable of abstract think- 
ing or of making investigations on their own 
initiative. Whatever may be their capacities 
or achievements, they are far below those of 
man. The first words of Genesis tell us once for 
all that God differentiated man from the lower 
animals, whether this was done at one stroke, 
or during a long period of ages, or whether 
the breath of life was breathed upon a clump 
of earth, or a mass of protoplasm. God 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and 
man became a living soul. So, too, is there a 
gap between man and Nature. A stone is an 
unconscious thing; man is a conscious being. 
The stone cannot pass to the man, and must 
always, so far as any power in it is concerned, 
remain a stone. But the man can pass over 
to the stone. He can mark it out, he can chisel 
it, he can make it live and throb and speak. 
So with countless lifeless things. Man has 
control over them and can make them do his 
bidding. 

We find that man is constantly meeting facts 
and influences which suggest action to him or 
which dissuade him from action. From this we 
deduce his will. He is impelled to act or not 



38 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

to act. From within he finds his appetites, 
his desires, his judgment forcing him one way 
or the other; from without he finds the facts 
of human intercourse or the surrounding ele- 
ments of his physical condition actuating him 
to do or not to do this or that. Through his 
will he can control these impelling forces and 
compel his mind, his heart, his tongue, his 
hands, his feet to act or move as he desires. 
The will in man sits upon the throne of his 
personality as the king of old sat upon the 
throne of his kingdom with absolute power to 
rule and control the subjects within his do- 
minion. It was the theory that the King ruled 
by a Divine right and appointment and that he 
could do no harm, but would naturally seek to 
do good. And so it is not only a theory, but 
the fact, in regard to the will. It is a Divine 
gift and is supposed to rule by Divine ap- 
pointment, to conform the action of man to 
goodness and truth. The action of the will is 
limited, just as the power of the king was, by 
forces over which man has no control. Man 
cannot choose his parentage, his original na- 
tionality, his physical constitution, his early 
environment, nor can he determine the action 
of others which might influence his own. But 
in all these cases he can use his will to counter- 
act any evil influence arising from these factors 
which he could not control. Strong wills have 



THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 39 

often surmounted obstacles arising from un- 
fortunate birth, or weak constitution, or early 
environment. 

Again, as man acts we find also that he 
judges concerning right and wrong. We con- 
clude, therefore, that he is a moral being. He 
has a conscience, a sense of duty and obliga- 
tion. Reduce man to his chemical compounds, 
warm these with heat, thrill them with electric- 
ity, and they will have no consciousness of 
right and wrong. Man knows himself to be 
under obligation, he is forced to admit that 
there is some law above him. He has an in- 
nate idea of right and wrong, of just deserts 
and deserved rewards, of guilt which wrong 
conduct makes him conscious of and of inno- 
cence which right conduct assures him of. He 
has a conscience to which appeal can be made. 
This conscience is a reality; it says to him in 
tones which he cannot mistake: I must, I must 
not, I ought, I ought not. He finds that oft- 
times his conscience is not an infallible guide. 
He may be left in doubt or be misled as to what 
he ought to do, just as his mind may lead him 
to draw wrong conclusions or leave him in 
doubt as to the result of his investigations. 
Rut as man has found throughout the history 
of the race that he can safely trust his mind 
and that his thinking faculties are subject to 
the widest training, so man has also found that 



40 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

he can trust his conscience and that it is capa- 
ble of such training as to make it susceptible 
to the very slightest movement in the moral 
realm. Man is born neither a thinker nor a 
moralist, but he is endowed at birth with an 
infinite capacity to become both. Argue as we 
may, we will find even the most selfish adherent 
to the rights of the individual admitting that 
there is an underlying basis of right conduct 
which all individuals must observe. When 
David cried out: "Search me, O Lord, and 
prove me," it was his conscience working upon 
him, and he wanted to confess his wrongdoing. 

So we find man acts with a capacity to think, 
to control his conduct and to judge between 
right and wrong. Each one of these faculties, 
the mental, the moral and the volitional, is 
brought into play when man undertakes to 
learn the things of God. He who would know 
God must do His will and be pure in heart as 
well as have his thinking faculties in training. 
We assume, therefore, that the will and the 
emotions are a necessary factor of right think- 
ing. 

We come close to the real man when we dis- 
cover his habits of thought. As a man think- 
eth in his heart so is he. His habit of thought, 
likewise, will be a powerful factor in determin- 
ing the right results of his thinking: more 
powerful even than the caliber of his mind. 



THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 41 

When Paul preached on Mars Hill and men- 
tioned the resurrection of Jesus, we are told 
that some of his hearers "mocked, and others 
said, we will hear thee again of this matter." 1 
Here are two attitudes of mind which indicate 
the lack of ability and the possession of ability 
to understand truth. The man who mocks cur- 
tails his chances to learn anything. "Mock- 
ery," said Tennyson, "is the fume of little 
hearts." He who derides or jeers, who is con- 
temptuous in action or speech, does so either 
because he is convinced of the truth of that at 
which he mocks and thereby seeks to convey the 
impression that he does not believe it ; or be- 
cause he is destitute of mental fiber or moral 
conviction. In either case he is to be pitied, 
and to be pitied because there is so little hope 
for him. 

Those who would "hear again of the matter" 
exhibit a normal condition of mind and body. 
Doubtless in the crowd of Greeks about Paul 
were those who wanted more light before they 
were ready to reject the doctrine of the res- 
urrection. Their minds were normal and open 
to the truth. Such a mind is the investigative 
mind, the mind which is ever the forerunner of 
progress and the constabulary of freedom. 

We find this mind active everywhere. The 
poet is stirred and excited by that mysterious 
i Book of Acts, Ch. 17:32. 



42 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

wooing of nature which haunts him when awake 
and asleep. The field, the forest, the moun- 
tain, has a message. It is as yet indistinct to 
him. He cannot grasp it. He would inter- 
pret it, however, so he would hear again the 
song of the birds, again behold the modesty 
of the wild-flowers, again bid Nature to 
tell him what she knows about life. The 
artist is under the selfsame spell. He does 
not paint streams, merely, or mountains, or 
wooded plains and glens. These are only ap- 
pearances. He would paint what they hide, 
and what his artist soul feels. So he seeks 
a continual interview with Nature, his whole 
being is open to her elusive humors and whims. 
The scholar invites with eager expectancy the 
tomes and records of the musty past or those 
of the ever present to tell him their story. 
They bring certain strange things to his mind, 
he would hear of them again. The scientist 
scans the heights of the heavens, digs into the 
depths of the earth, trails the bottom of the 
ocean, pierces the dank growth of the jungle, 
stands on the top of the mountain that belches 
out fire and smoke, only to hear again, to ques- 
tion more closely. No labor is too great, no 
task too difficult or dangerous to deter him 
from seeking a personal interview with the 
forces of Nature in the hope of making them 
disclose their mystery. The mind is open 



THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 43 

everywhere and everywhere re-echoes the re- 
frain : we would hear thee again of this matter. 

And there are certain well regulated rules 
by which man, in his thought-activity, is 
guided. In the development of the arts we find 
a three-fold law everywhere applicable. There 
is first a striving after form, then comes a pe- 
riod when form has been mastered, and finally 
there is a breaking away from form, an eman- 
cipation from too great insistence upon form 
without returning to the previous formless 
state. An artist, as he blocks out his land- 
scape or portrait, strives after form: the con- 
tour of the face, the configuration of the scene. 
He moves in straight lines and with bold 
strokes until the form has been attained. 
Then seemingly ignoring the form he begins to 
move away from it, to infuse life into the face 
or the field and forest. The keynote of art is 
life, and the true artist turns to his work in- 
voluntarily with the conviction that he came to 
give life to every endeavor of his art. He is 
an artist, however, because below the surface 
he sees the underlying form, without which 
there can be no life. 

This fact is important as it really marks 
man as capable of being the object of revela- 
tion. It has played its part in every species 
of evolution. Turn, for example, to the devel- 
opment of music, and especially on that com- 



44 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

monest of all instruments, found in almost 
every household, the pianoforte. In the begin- 
ning the great masters, Bach especially, strove 
earnestly for form. They gave us a style of 
music which is uninteresting to the average 
hearer and which is appreciated only by the 
musically trained, — the so-called counterpoint, 
of which the fugue is the chief production. With 
Beethoven began another era of striving after 
and attainment of form, a style of music en- 
tirely different from that of the early com- 
posers, the so-called harmonic system, of which 
the sonata on the piano and the symphony of 
the orchestra are chief examples. Here was 
form attained which, even in a Beethoven, be- 
came hard and fast. Then came the inevitable 
emancipation from form, the infusing of life 
into the systems of Bach and Beethoven, which 
found its highest accomplishment in such pia- 
nists as Liszt and Chopin and the great musi- 
cal-dramatist, Wagner. 

Now music, to continue the illustration, may 
be regarded as a science or as an art. The 
science of music concerns itself with the rela- 
tions of the notes of the musical scale to each 
other. And on this science, or relationship, 
are based all forms of music, the most light and 
popular songs of the day as well as the classi- 
cal or romantic productions. Men may be- 
come such adepts in the science of music as to 



THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 45 

analyze mentally a composition and lose much 
of its aesthetic and emotional significance. 
They may be profoundly versed in the form 
and technique of music as a science and be un- 
touched by it as an art, just as an habitual 
church-goer can be a keen critic of a sermon, 
appreciating its value as a piece of literature 
or logical reasoning and remain dead to its 
spiritual appeal; or a physicist may be an 
expert in the qualities of light and color and 
stand listless before a masterpiece of painting. 
But this is not the natural tendency of man. 
He strives for form that he may give, and 
not withhold, life. In spite of himself he is an 
artist as well as a scientist. As the musician 
is born with the cry echoing about him, I am 
come to infuse spirit and life into the forms 
and technique of music and make the heart- 
strings of humanity vibrate with melody, so 
all men in their innate proclivities key their 
lives to the life-giving. 

Science gives us form ; art life. What we 
find in the work of man as it proceeds in its 
tendency from form to life, we also find trace- 
able in the work of God. We cannot look upon 
Him merely as the Creator giving us form. 
Science in one way or another attributes cre- 
ation to God. But if He were a creator only 
as scientist and not also as artist, we would 
have a world with God outside of it, interested 



46 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

only in the form thereof, starting it and then 
leaving it to care for itself, resident on the rim 
of the universe, but not in its very heart, the 
pulse-beat of its life. We read in beautiful 
poesy that the earth in the beginning was 
without form and void, and that God shaped 
the heavens and the earth, giving form to sun 
and moon and stars, raising the mountains, 
hollowing out the valleys, covering the deeps 
with water, filling earth and sea and skj r with 
living matter. But there was something be- 
neath to which He could not give externality. 
Science can tell us about the earth; art only 
can describe the life of the universe. As some 
one has strikingly said : 2 "To the scientist 
the earth must forever roll around the central 
solar fire ; to the poet the sun must forever set 
behind the Western hills." So God, in creat- 
ing the earth went from science to art, from 
form to life. His activity as the Subject of 
revelation is in kind the same as that of man 
the object of revelation. Living man under- 
stands God because he has the artist's instinct 
and impulse. His mind has connection with 
his heart and the cold logic of his thought is 
infused with the warm blood of his emotion. 
In his thought-activity he makes for life, — life 
that is based on form but not encrusted in it. 

2 Quoted by C. F. B. Masterman: In Peril of Change, 
p. 2U. 



THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 47 

Such is man, the object of God's revelation. 
He expresses and realizes himself in action. 
The directive, as well as motive, power of his 
activity is his habit of thought which proceeds 
in orderly form to give life. 



CONDITIONS OF RECEIVING 
REVELATION 



IV 

CONDITIONS OF RECEIVING 
REVELATION 

"The idea that pieces of information have been super- 
naturally and without any employment of their own in- 
tellectual faculties communicated at various times to 
particular persons, their truth being guaranteed by 
miracles — in the sense of interruptions of the ordinary 
course of nature by an extraordinary fiat of creative 
power — is one which is already rejected by most mod- 
ern theologians, even among those who would generally 
be called rather conservative theologians." — Hastings 
Rashdall. 

The things that God freely gives us are the 
things everywhere about us and in which we 
are concerned in every way. The sum of them 
makes up our world. Into this world we bring 
nothing. We have only what we have been 
given. We exist only because our existence 
has been made possible. We create because 
both the materials and the means of creation 
have been furnished us. We live, if our pres- 
ence here is really life and not merely existence, 
because we have submitted ourselves to laws 
which are orderly and beneficent and to a will 
51 



52 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

whose natural and essential expression is that 
of helpfulness and uplift. 

Primitive man discovered these things for 
himself after long and ofttimes painful and 
sometimes disastrous experience. He did not 
know how to explain the giving of these bene- 
fits or whom to recognize as the giver. But 
in his untutored way he made what acknowl- 
edgment he could. He drew rude pictures, as 
in Babylonia, of man set in a garden with all 
the benefits of Paradise about him, or, as in 
Egypt, of the sun whose limitless rays ended 
each in a hand outstretched to earth bestowing 
the gifts of heaven. Or he had crude ideas of 
the substance from which all the good things of 
the earth came. Now he declared that this Su- 
preme substance was water, now air, now fire. 
But as he became more enlightened, as in the 
days of the Hebrew Psalmist, he began to de- 
clare the goodness of an eternal and only Be- 
ing, of God the maker and creator of the uni- 
verse, who brought man into existence, who 
loved him, and who freely gave to him of his 
priceless and exhaustless treasures. 

If we are inclined to look upon the utter- 
ances of Scripture as sentimental, not founded 
in fact, we need only to turn to the declara- 
tions of science to find, substantiation. The 
world is made for man and each organ of man 
has its proper environment. There is light for 



CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 53 

the eye, and wealth of sound for the ear, and 
plastic matter for the hand, and materials of 
thought for the brain. There is food to sat- 
isfy hunger, there is drink to quench thirst, 
there is shade from the sun and shelter from 
the rain and a night time for sleep and re- 
cuperation. Every living creature finds exter- 
nal to itself the complement of that which is in- 
ternal. And so marked are these arrangements 
and phenomena of life with an evidence of in- 
telligence and good intention behind them that 
they are declared by the scientist, to quote 
Mr. Agassiz, to be the "premeditation of 
God," the "eternal orders of the thoughts of 
God." They are the things of God which He 
freely gives us ; life with all its vicissitudes, the 
opportunity for toilsome but worthy activity. 
Now every object which presents itself to 
man can be looked upon in at least two ways. 
We can look at it as what it appears to be, 
or as what it really is. The heavens above 
us are, at the same time, what we term the 
visible and also the astronomical heavens. 
The visible heavens are what we see at night 
with the naked eye or even with a telescope ; 
the astronomical heavens are what the astrono- 
mer sees. The visible heavens are the less real 
heavens, they are only what they appear to 
be ; while the astronomical heavens are the more 
real heavens because they approximate closely 



54 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

to the heavens which really are. This illustra- 
tion can be taken as an indication of the differ- 
ence between a thing as it appears to us and 
that thing as it really is. And we note that 
we come to a knowledge of the thing as it 
really is by a closer scrutiny and study; by 
using a kind of knowledge adapted to the know- 
ing-possibility of that thing. 

The ancients discovered the electrical prop- 
erties of amber. But not knowing anything 
about electricity they described amber as it ap- 
peared to them, i.e., they declared the mineral 
was possessed of a living soul. They could 
not understand how it could have properties 
of action unless either the soul of a man or a 
god resided therein. So, too, they were often 
painfully aware of the deadly properties of 
gas. If a man went down into a well and was 
suffocated, he was said to have been struck by 
some deadly hand. Or if he went into a mine 
and exposed a light and flashing flames and 
thunderous explosions were the result, often 
killing men without leaving any marks on the 
bodies, he was convinced that some supernat- 
ural agent was present. Because so it ap- 
peared to him. Yet the same faculties for 
rightly understanding these phenomena were 
possessed by the men of those days as well as 
by men of later days. They did not give the 
matter closer study because they were too much 



CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 55 

possessed with the idea of ghosts and super- 
natural visitors. 

For many long centuries men believed the 
world was created in six days of twenty-four 
hours each. Yet the same marks, which later 
and more thoughtful men used to disprove such 
a theory, were on the mountains and in the 
canons and river beds the whole time the er- 
roneous view was held. It seemed as though 
the finger of God had written this record in 
rock and fossil and alluvial drift and there were 
no eyes open to see. Now that men have gone 
behind the visible works of God and approach 
to a knowledge of His true self we do not find 
He was any the less real when men ignorantly 
worshiped Him than now when the scientific 
use of the mind is declaring Him unto us. 1 

God reveals Himself in many ways and at 
different times. Revelation is a growing proc- 
ess, and not a complete deliverance. This is 
true because life itself is a growth and the truth 
that is connected with life an expanding con- 
tent. Knowledge comes in generalities, not in 
particulars. We say that Columbus discovered 
America, but what he discovered was an island 

i "The ancients believed the pearl to be the condensed 
dew of heaven, but the discovery of the actual process 
of pearlmaking has not detracted from the beauty of 
the gem or cut down its market value." Francis J. 
McConnell: The Diviner Immanence, p. 87. 



56 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

to the south of us. He had no idea of the main 
land itself, especially of its later exploration. 
Newton discovered the law of gravity, but 
his problem was worked out by other 
scientists and in a way which opened up 
a new world, even for Newton himself, when he 
saw the complete building reared on the foun- 
dation of his discovery. The continent of 
America said, in effect, to Columbus and the 
law of gravity, in effect, to Newton, "I have 
yet many things to say unto you, but you can 
not bear them now." So God has revealed 
Himself in Nature. The rocks which He has 
thrown up, the trees and the flowers which He 
has caused to grow, came, as it were, once for 
all. But man has been blasting into the rocks 
and analyzing the trees and flowers for the 
further solution of their mystery, and they 
have not yet disclosed their full story. 

So God has revealed Himself in the Scrip- 
tures. He has laid a deposit which, in essence, 
is complete and final. Yet man has been work- 
ing upon this deposit for better means of dis- 
covering God's way. Thus and thus only can 
man learn God's truth. Revelation will come to 
him as he puts himself in the way of meeting 
it. The words Jesus spoke, aside from any 
orthodox belief concerning His being, afford 
the measure by which truth should be esti- 
mated. He promulgated the spiritual law of 



CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 57 

gravity and this law draws everything near to 
the center of truth. It is the force which will 
hold man's thought in its proper orbit, despite 
all counter attractions and repulsions. But 
man can refuse to run his mind in this orbit. 
He, therefore, will be in no condition to receive 
God's revelation. 

The communion of the spirit of man with the 
spirit of God results, as we see, in God's dis- 
closing Himself to the soul of man. "There 
is a spirit in man and the inspiration of the 
Almighty giveth them understanding." 2 
This is revelation : a breathing in by the spirit 
of man of the spirit of God. God moves upon 
a prepared mind. Revelation is a challenge 
to the intellect. There must be an attitude 
conducive to receiving a revelation before a 
revelation can be possible. God cannot reveal 
Himself to an irresponsive soul any more than 
He can to a stone or a block of wood. A few 
simple illustrations will show this. Stevenson 
in his often quoted "A Chapter on Dreams" 3 
tells us that "he was from a child an ardent 
and uncomfortable dreamer." In the begin- 
ning this experience was most unpleasant to 
him. He "struggled hard against the ap- 
proaches of that slumber which was the begin- 
ning of sorrows." "But presently, in the course 

2 Job 32:8. 

s Biographical Edition: Across the Plains, p. 206. 



58 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

of his growth, . . . his visions were more 
constantly supported. . . . His dreams, 
too, as befitted a mind better stocked with par- 
ticulars, became more circumstantial, and had 
more the air and continuity of life." The rea- 
son for all this was that he "had long been in 
the custom of setting himself to sleep with 
tales ; and so had his father before him." He 
had habituated himself, perhaps unconsciously, 
to see strange as well as usual things in his 
sleep. This "amusement" he later turned to 
account when "he began to write and sell his 
tales." "The stories must now be trimmed and 
pared and set upon all fours, they must run 
from a beginning to an end and fit (after a 
manner) with the laws of life." 

In this same way man habituates himself to 
discover truth. He puts himself in the way of 
receiving a revelation. The mathematician, as 
is well known, can work out his problems men- 
tally. He has a sense of numbers and they 
respond to his most delicate touch. He takes 
his start from the pure perceptions of space 
and time, goes on freely constructing figures in 
space without reference to experience, and dem- 
onstrates the properties of such figures. And 
he can forecast what others must prove by actu- 
ally working out. 

The natural scientist goes further still. He 
knows of discoveries before they are made. As 



CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 59 

the sailors in the North sea know when they are 
approaching the ice long before they actually 
see it by a bright appearance near the horizon 
which the Greenland men cail the "blink of the 
ice," 4 so does the scientist forecast certain dis- 
coveries long before they are realized because 
of the white light which his investigations 
project upon the horizon of human knowledge. 
Professor Shaler says : "It is indeed safe to say 
that any general truth in science has been 
known to the discoverer before it appeared in 
the facts as critically verified." 5 Emerson, 
fifty years before, said: "Every known fact in 
natural science was divined by the presenti- 
ment of somebody before it was actually veri- 
fied." 6 Why? Because any man who trains 
his mind on some great truth will see more and 
deeper and farther than the immediate experi- 
ence of other men will lead them to believe. 
"Verification is then demanded," to use the 
words of Professor Shaler, "in order to recon- 
cile the thought with the observation." 

Interesting illustrations of this kind can be 
adduced to show conclusively that the mind of 

* Robert Southey: Life of Nelson, p. 13. 

e The Individual, p. 308. 

6 Works, Vol. Ill, p. 176, Essay on Nature. "Every- 
one knows how Darwin, by showing that earthworms 
have made most of the fertile soil of the world, verified 
in detail what Gilbert White had foreseen in 1777." J. 
Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 15. 



60 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

man is not limited in its operation. The one 
essential for extraordinary accomplishment is 
the persistent application by individual men of 
the powers they possess. Newton gave the 
whole secret in five words when asked how he 
came to discover the law of gravitation. "By 
always thinking about it !" By always think- 
ing about it, keeping the mind actively concen- 
trated on some one thing, consciously working 
with the mind until the mind works uncon- 
sciously for man. Stevenson doubtless gave a 
more complete account of the secret of his great 
knack of story-telling in the few words he wrote 
to a friend 7 rather than in his whole essay, "A 
Chapter on Dreams." "I am still a 'slow 
study,' and sit for a long while silent on my 
eggs. Unconscious thought, there is the only 
method: macerate your subject, let it boil slow, 
then take the lid off and look in — and there 
your stuff is good or bad." Moments of great 
inspiration come to men and they see far be- 
yond the outer edge into the very heart of a 
problem. But these moments, on the one hand, 
are neither miraculous nor inexplicable, and on 
the other, are not to be forced by any unusual 
or extraneous efforts. "The pathways here," 
as has been well said, "are no flights of Pega- 

i A Letter to Mr. W. Crabbe Angus of Glasgow, 
quoted in Weir of Hermiston, Biographical Edition, p. 
175. 



CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 61 

sus ; they are the daily route of the ideas of 
a trained mind in a familiar country." 

Truth always comes to man in the appear- 
ance of a miracle. Each new phase of truth, as 
man first meets it, sends a thrill through his 
whole frame: mem in all ages, both modern and 
ancient, have been undone as truth dawned 
upon them. Yet man's means for working out 
that truth and making it his own are the nat- 
ural means he would use to solve any problem 
that might come to him, however ordinary that 
problem might be. Archimedes, the most cele- 
brated geometrician of antiquity, was commis- 
sioned by King Hiero of Syracuse to determine 
the amount of alloy in the King's crown with- 
out destroying the crown. It occurred to him 
one day how this could be accomplished as he 
stepped into the bath and noticed the overflow 
caused by the displacement of the water. This 
truth so thrilled him that he ran home through 
the streets unclad, crying heureka: "I have 
found it." Yet he had to work out that truth 
by cold, mathematical calculation before it be- 
came fixed as a truth. When Newton saw that 
his theoretic results were approaching an em- 
pirical fact, the truth overwhelmed him: "his 
hand shook, the figures danced, and he was so 
agitated that he was forced to call in an as- 
sistant to finish the computation." 8 But the 

s Emerson: Works, Vol. 8, p. 21. 



62 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

computation had to be made, and by the slow, 
deliberate natural processes man has at his 
command. 

As we look upon the revelation of God in 
this light it becomes concrete and tangible. 
Man's perception of the revelation is reduced to 
a fixed law of mind and heart. 9 The prophets 
of old were able to speak of God's mind for 
the future because they knew God's mind in the 
present. They were never flippant in the pres- 
ence of God or presumed to be on familiar 
terms with Him. They bore themselves before 
Him as true gentlemen. They were always 
humble and devout seekers of His truth and 
purposes. By constantly communing with 
Him in this manner they discovered His nature. 
As they were also aware of man's conduct and 
needs, it was no remarkable feat for them to 
declare how God's love would be operative con- 
cerning man's conduct and his needs. They 
saw the inclination of the twig and could 
prophesy regarding the bend of the tree. Men 
in other ages, for similar reasons, have also 

9 "What Nature does not reveal to thy spirit, thou 
wilt not wrench from her with levers and screws," 
Goethe has well said. Nevertheless, "it has been the 
conviction of devout and discerning souls in all ages 
that God does not force Himself upon men, but that 
the seekers find Him, the pure in heart see Him, the 
men of faith are very sure of Him." Buckham: Per- 
sonality and the Christian Ideal, p. 210. 



CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 63 

been prophets. Thomas Jefferson was one 
when almost sixty years before the outbreak of 
the Civil War he said in reference to slavery, 
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that 
God is just." 10 

The conditions of receiving revelation, there- 
fore, are the conditions we must regard in mat- 
ters of growth and progress anywhere. As 
men individually prepare themselves to receive 
the truth do they have revelations. God 
speaks to individuals, not to men in general. 
"All revelations, whether of mechanical or in- 
tellectual or moral science, are made, not to 
communities, but to single persons." u This 
is so because truth cannot be generally or vi- 
cariously accepted. Each individual must re- 
ceive the truth on his own account and in the 
crucible of his soul and mind make it his own. 

It is well to emphasize this fact, on the one 
hand, as a protest against any view that would 
regard revelation as closed and the light de- 
livered to the Fathers as the strongest light 
from the divine fire, and, on the other hand, as 

10 Rashdall has an interesting discussion on the im- 
portance of the mind in prophesy. "The Jewish proph- 
ets did not arrive at their ideas about God without a 
great deal of hard thinking," and "there are obvious 
indications of profound intellectual thought" even in 
the teaching of Jesus. Philosophy and Religion, p. 
134 ff. 

ii Emerson: Works, Vol. VI, p. 239, Considerations 
by the Way. 



64 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

an encouragement to those who want to believe, 
but who cannot accept doctrines or dogmas 
which have no counterpart in present day ex- 
periences. There is a great difference between 
the sun shining on a stone and on a tree. Hy- 
drogen in relation to a multitude of substances 
remains only hydrogen. It becomes quite a 
new thing when it touches oxygen. There can 
be life only where there is life. The more life 
we crave the more we shall have. Religion is 
life and truth must be worked out in life. If 
we are truly living, therefore, we shall receive 
such revelations as shall satisfy us. And our 
minds and hearts will ever be open to receive 
the further teaching of the spirit of truth. 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 

"The word inspired is usually reserved for that which 
has a more direct bearing upon human life and con- 
duct. Those who believe in the daily and hourly in- 
spiration of conduct can have little difficulty in believ- 
ing that this inspiration may take and does constantly 
take the form of an impulse to write a book. But of 
course this inspiration may be of a higher or a lower 
kind. No book can be well and nobly written save by 
the help of the Divine Spirit: but we easily recog- 
nize that works which directly bear upon conduct are 
inspired in quite another sense from works of fancy or 
imagination, or works of science or criticism or philos- 
ophy." — Percy Gardiner. 

Man, when he came upon earth, found the 
record of God's presence and he contemplated 
it in its various forms long before it occurred 
to him to make a record of God's revelation on 
his own account. In fact, it may be said that 
man not only came into existence as a record of 
God's presence in the world, but that he also be- 
came a medium through which God could con- 
tinue His revelation and make it definitely and 
personally known. Man no sooner was con- 
scious of himself than he discovered the master 
hand of the Almighty all about him. 
67 



68 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

This is true in the same way as the tourist in 
the great galleries of Europe will recognize 
the work of the masters. There is something 
in an old painting that the beholder instinc- 
tively feels to be a real, almost superhuman, ex- 
pression of life. Something in the picture 
strikes something in the beholder. There is a 
unity of feeling. Deep cries unto deep, and 
the presence of the Eternal is made manifest. 
It is given to some men to study the great mas- 
terpieces in the galleries and to go forth and 
make their essence known, to verify and actual- 
ize the spirit and the purpose of the painter. 
So it is given to men in the great gallery of 
nature and life to vivify and to actualize; to 
send forth as the ready coin of human exchange 
the spirit and the purpose of nature and the 
underlying essence of being. Men of all ages 
have been able to approach the heart of the 
Universe, to discover its message and to make 
that message known to the world. 

This is true; a fact that no one will under- 
take to dispute. Now it happens that God 
chose men whom He endowed with a special gift 
to commune with Him, to learn His mind and 
heart, and to make that knowledge known unto 
their fellow men. The question repeatedly oc- 
curs : was there a body of revelation committed 
to certain men at a certain time which, in a 
sense, gave a complete disclosure of the mind 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 69 

and will of God so as to preclude any further 
revelation of God along these lines ? This leads 
to the direct revelation of God in the Bible. 
Have we here a content which is complete in 
itself, to which no additions can be made? 

If we understand God rightly, especially if 
we appreciate the revelation which Jesus 
made of Him; and, further, if we take 
into due account the demands of the in- 
tellectual needs of man; we cannot say that 
God spoke to His people once for all, that He 
gave certain men during a limited period of 
time a knowledge of Himself which would be 
absolutely complete, which could not be added 
to or modified in any way. On the other hand, 
we must hold that the Bible is a record of 
God's revelation which furnishes man not only 
with a guide for his daily life, but also with a 
content which he may test in the melting-pot 
of his mind and find adequate material for all 
his intellectual demands. To resolve this seem- 
ing contradiction as to man's ability to read 
God's mind to-day as in any of the past ages 
and the revelation which the Holy Scriptures 
give us, we are helped by the illustration which 
President Francis J. McConnell has given us in 
his little book, The Diviner Immanence (p. 83). 
"We may think of the exploration of the world 
from Columbus on through a century after. 
Through exceptional opportunity, exceptional 



TO REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

endowment, and exceptional personal endeavor 
the explorers of that time accomplished a task 
once for all; more, a task in which they can 
never have rivals. The writers of the Scrip- 
ture performed the great service of the discov- 
ery and exploration of the spiritual fundamen- 
tals once for all." It is only on a basis such 
as this that we can satisfy ourselves as to the 
kind and nature of God's revelation in the 
Bible. 

When we look in the Bible, therefore, we find 
a revelation which many men consider to be the 
most complete discovery and satisfactory ex- 
position of the being of God. The revelation in 
the Bible is the being of God entered into the 
being of men and forming that close communion 
of man and his Maker which every human 
being instinctively feels and persistently under- 
takes to realize. In the Bible are set forth the 
fundamental truths which differentiate man from 
every other order of creation and elevate him 
to a plane which no other form of creation can 
even approximate. In the Bible God is reveal- 
ing man to man and in the process of this rev- 
elation reveals God to man so that man under- 
stands the kind of being he is and the kind he 
may become. Great and inspiring as is the 
revelation of God in nature; noble and elevating 
as is the revelation of God in literature other 
than the Bible and among peoples other than the 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 71 

Hebrews and early Christians ; there is some- 
thing so distinctive in the revelation of God as 
found in our Bible, as to set it entirely apart 
and differentiate it from every other divine 
revelation. 

We have just said that God used certain men 
in a certain way as the means, or instruments, 
of His revelation as set forth in the Holy 
Scriptures. That is, certain men were inspired 
of God to record His revelations. What is 
meant by inspiration is a question of great sig- 
nificance. It admits of various interpretations 
and in no age seems to have had a definition 
which men will accept without question. 

When we speak of evolution, there are differ- 
ent ways in which the term can be used. To- 
day it is becoming more and more fixed in its 
meaning as method, merely, and never as cause. 
It is being rapidly divested of the significations 
which made it a stumbling block to faith. The 
word "inspiration," however, which gave stu- 
dents of the Scriptures trouble long before the 
theory of evolution as a cause was expounded, 
still remains in doubtful associations. There 
are those who will say that inspiration can 
mean only one thing, namely, the utterance, 
audible or otherwise, of the Almighty to man, 
this utterance being construed as final in itself 
and which man could record exactly as re- 
ceived, not letting the same go through the 



72 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

alembic either of his intellect or experience. 
In other words, man, so far as the biblical 
writer is concerned, is an unconscious being, an 
automaton. God speaks to him, and he moves, 
not knowing that he is moving or the purpose 
of the movement. 

While this theory has appealed to many and 
still holds considerable force in the discussions 
on inspiration, it would seem that God in this 
way is robbed of any satisfaction whatsoever in 
the mental and moral development of His chil- 
dren. It would remove Him infinitely from 
them. If He had no way of speaking to them 
other than to move mechanically upon a human 
being and make this human being give forth 
His utterance, He might just as well move in 
like way upon a stone or a stump of a tree. 
There would be no more consciousness in a man 
mechanically moved than there would be in a 
stone or a block of wood and it would be just 
as easy for God to vivify and inspire a piece 
of granite or iron as it would be for Him to 
move an unconscious human being. If the in- 
strument of the inspiration is to have no part 
in the receiving and the transmitting of the 
message other than having it go through him, 
God could just as well use an inanimate object. 
God would be as distant in this kind of an in- 
spiration from the human race as He is distant 
from the unconscious objects of nature. It 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 73 

would be as if He merely set man to going as 
one might wind and start a clock, that man 
would continue in motion only as long as the 
mechanism worked, and that God, therefore, 
would repeatedly have to come into the world 
to keep human kind wound up. It would not 
place Him in the world itself, a living, vital 
part of the creatures whom He created. It 
would deprive Him of continual communication 
with them. He could not instruct them as to 
their further needs and according to their will- 
ingness to learn. 

This mechanical theory of inspiration will 
not hold. It puts God too far away from the 
race. Man instinctively feels something in 
himself so akin to the Godhead that he believes 
he was made to commune with God. Com- 
munion implies an interchange of thought and 
confidence. We commune with each other as we 
give and take. Our souls are illuminated 
and satisfied as we give of them to our fel- 
lows and as we partake of the content 
of their souls. So God could not reveal Him- 
self to man if He could not commune with 
man. He evidently made man for this pur- 
pose, else He would have stopped with the brute 
creation. He gave man the conviction that he 
was to have dominion over every lower order of 
nature ; furthermore, that man was to 
spread abroad in the earth and subdue it. The 



74 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

feeling of dependence man has always had, even 
when he has attained to highest intellectual ca- 
pacity and has performed truly wonderful feats, 
leads him still to think that God created him for 
the purpose of bringing to effect in the world 
which He has made His kingdom of truth and 
righteousness and love. Man continues to cry 
out to his Maker, "What is man, that thou hast 
visited him and set thine heart upon him?" So, 
while with one breath mankind will sometimes 
insist upon this mechanical theory of inspira- 
tion, with another breath he will deny 
the theory and declare it to be impossible. In 
order for God to reveal Himself He must have 
an object capable of receiving the revelation. 
Mind can only work upon mind and heart upon 
heart, and we dare not rob man of his mind and 
his heart and make him an irresponsive instru- 
ment through which, or by which, the word of 
God is to come to the race. 

Not satisfied with the mechanical theory of 
inspiration, other men have insisted upon the 
verbal nature of inspiration. God spoke to 
man, and man, through his mind and heart, re- 
ceived the message in the exact words in which 
God spoke. This theory, while really not differ- 
ing from the mechanical, is insisted upon in 
order to relieve the Bible of inaccuracies or lack 
of authority. If we have not the exact words 
of the Almighty, how can we believe that the Al- 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 75 

mighty has spoken to us? The cry is raised 
that, if we do not admit that we have the 
ipissima verba, we have no warrant that God has 
spoken and hence are left without authority in 
matters religious. 

It would seem that this question of verbal 
inspiration ought to be very easily answered. 
It is well known, of course, that the Bibles 
which we use to-day are translations from the 
original texts and it is of course known that 
every nationality has its own Bible. Thousands 
of these Bibles are printed every week. If we 
insist upon the verbal inspiration of the Bible 
we must insist, not only that every nationality 
has been able to translate into its own tongue 
the original and exact words of the Holy Scrip- 
tures, but we must guard against any mistakes 
or errors which the typesetters might make in 
setting up the Bible. That such errors do creep 
in, is proved by the fact that the publishers of 
the Oxford Bible offer their proof-readers large 
rewards for the discovery of any typographical 
error after the proof has passed under the eye 
of two or three expert proof-readers. If we are 
to insist upon verbal inspiration we surely must 
go to the length of insisting that every typeset- 
ter and proof-reader is inspired. For mistakes 
might creep in through their inaccurate work, 
and it would seem that in this case we should 
have to insist that they were mere automatons, 



76 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

on the mechanical theory, inspired to re-print 
the record accurately. 

Taking our English Bible alone we have at 
least three editions. One is the King James ver- 
sion, another is the Revised version, and the 
third is the American Edition of the Revised ver- 
sion. There are important differences in these 
versions. In fact, the Revised version was made 
for the sole purpose of correcting the errors and 
inaccuracies in the translations of the King 
James version. Now why should there have 
been, on the theory of verbal inspiration, any in- 
accuracies in the King James version and why 
did it happen that not only the American and 
English revisers disagreed among themselves 
as to what the proper translation in several 
cases should be, but that the English revisers 
had a disagreement among themselves and had 
to pass the final verdict by majority vote? If 
the Revised Edition of the Bible is more nearly 
correct than the King James version, then it 
would seem, on the verbal theory of inspiration, 
that we must declare the English revisers from 
1881 down to the time that the Revised version 
was printed were more inspired than the trans- 
lators of the King James version. 

When we go from the translations back to the 
original manuscripts, what do we find? The 
oldest Hebrew manuscript dates from the ninth 
century a. d. and is at present in the Royal Mu- 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 77 

seum in St. Petersburg. As a matter of fact, 
the earliest Hebrew manuscript was written not 
much later than the ninth century b. c. and was 
not that part of the Scriptures which the manu- 
script of the ninth century a. d. contains. 
What became of all the versions of the Old 
Testament from the time they were written up 
to the ninth century a. d.? It will be seen at 
once through what countless hands the manu- 
scripts must have passed. 

In the New Testament the matter becomes 
even more serious. To be a critical student of 
the New Testament one must be able not only to 
read several languages, but to decipher manu- 
scripts written by many hands at widely sep- 
arated times and which differ greatly in their 
content. Even the New Testament writers 
themselves were not accurate when they quoted 
from the Old Testament. We find two hundred 
and seventy-five Old Testament quotations in the 
New Testament. 1 Of these only fifty-three 
agree ; that is, in only fifty-three has the Septu- 
agint correctly rendered the Hebrew and in turn 
been correctly quoted by the New Testa- 
ment writer. There are only ten passages of 
the Septuagint version correctly translated 
from the Hebrew. There are thirty-seven pas- 
sages in the New Testament which have been in- 

i C. H. Toy: Quotations from Old Testament; Marcus 
Dods: The Bible: Its Origin and Nature, p. 113, f. 



78 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

correctly quoted from the Septuagint. There 
are seventy-six passages in the New Testament 
in which the Septuagint version has been al- 
tered into a rendering which does not agree with 
the original Hebrew, and there are ninety-nine 
passages in the New Testament where the quo- 
tation is different both from the Septuagint and 
from the original Hebrew. If we say that our 
Bible is verbally inspired and that we have to- 
day the verbal record which God gave to men 
from time to time as it appears in Holy Writ, 
how are we tp overcome these many difficulties? 
On the other hand, if the Bible is not verbally 
inspired, is it the word of God? 

We must come to a more simple and satis- 
factory definition of the word "inspiration." 
We cannot say that the Bible is mechanically in- 
spired, or that it is verbally inspired. Luke 
gives us, as his reason for writing to his friend, 
"the most excellent Theophilus," the fact that 
so many had undertaken to set forth a declara- 
tion of the beliefs of the early followers of 
Jesus. It was necessary for him to do so be- 
cause he felt sure that he had information which 
either was more accurate or which he could set 
forth with fuller light than others had. Luke 
says that he got his information from those 
"which from the beginning were eye witnesses 
and ministers of the word." He does not say 
that his message comes direct from the mouth 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 79 

of God. It came to him through the word of 
many mouths long after the facts he was de- 
scribing happened and long after the words 
of Jesus he is quoting were spoken. 

With Luke as an example, it seems that we 
can go for our definition back to Job, who de- 
clared that "there is a spirit in man, and the 
inspiration of the Almighty giveth them under- 
standing." This spirit in man is alive, it is 
quick, it cannot be moved upon in any mechan- 
ical way. By its very nature it must have a real 
part and activity in any inspiration which it 
might receive. The effect of the inspiration of 
the Almighty upon this spirit is not to issue in 
a verbal reproduction of words spoken, but is to 
issue in an understanding. That is, the spirit 
as it is moved upon by the inspiration of the 
Almighty understands, and as it understands it 
undertakes to give forth that understanding to 
others. The very essence of the nature of man 
makes this possible and necessary. 

As we look at the achievements of the human 
race we can always find the cause for its prog- 
ress in this understanding which the spirit of 
man has had through the inspiration of the 
Almighty. In music the spirit of man has been 
moved upon to such an extent by the underlying 
harmony of the spheres that man has caught 
this harmony and has given it forth in various 
ways until a listening world has heard the Al- 



80 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

mighty speak in the musical tones of heaven. 
In art man has been influenced by the spirit 
of the Almighty to such an extent that he has 
been able to move his hand upon lifeless can- 
vas or cold stone and make canvas and stone 
speak. No verbal inspiration here could be 
thinkable. Only as the artist had the under- 
standing which the Almighty gave him could he 
work out the revelation he received from God. 
So we can look in the great literature of past 
and present days and find the spirit of God mov- 
ing upon the spirit of man in a similar way. So 
in commerce, in trade, so in politics and states- 
manship, so even in the most humble affairs and 
the humdrum tasks of daily life, the spirit of 
God is manifest in the life of man. The spirit 
of man is susceptible to enlightenment through 
the inspiration of the Almighty. This under- 
standing coming from God helps man to reveal 
God's thought and to fix His purpose. 

But some will say, if this be true, there is 
then no difference between the inspiration which 
we have in the literature of to-day and the in- 
spiration which we have in the literature of the 
Bible. In principle there is no difference. 
God is moving upon the hearts and minds of 
men to-day even as He moved in the past. He 
is giving man His revelation and man is in- 
spired by Him to give forth His product to the 
world. We cannot believe, on the principle of 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 81 

inspiration enounced by Job, that God did not 
inspire Milton and Tennyson and Browning or 
Whittier and Longfellow and Sill. 

But there is a degree of inspiration which 
differentiates the inspired poem or essay of to- 
day from the inspired word of Holy Writ. 
As we saw in the matter of revelation that the 
men of Bible times were moved by the Almighty 
to make discoveries in the realm of spiritual and 
moral truth which were all-inclusive, so do we 
find that the men of Bible times were inspired 
to give forth that discovery which sets them 
apart forever as laboring under an inspiration 
of a distinct kind. We know that all books of 
the Old and the New Testament are not equal. 
There is a degree or range of spiritual truth 
or awakening, and this fact should lead us to 
insist upon the degree of inspiration as being 
indicative of the quality of the inspiration. 
As has been well said, the presence of inspira- 
tion is discernible in the product ; yet the mean- 
ing and nature of inspiration cannot be decided 
by abstract reflection, but only by study of the 
outcome. "What inspiration is must be 
learned from what it does. . . . We must 
not determine the character of the books from 
the inspiration, but must rather determine the 
nature of the inspiration from the books." 2 

2 Borden P. Bowne: The Christian Revelation, p. 44, 
f, later published in Studies in Christianity, p. 29, f. 



82 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

The highest product of Browning or Tennyson 
is ennobling. It leads us to the Inner Courts 
of the Almighty. It gives us a real under- 
standing of Him. Nevertheless, there is an 
essential difference between the inspiration of 
the modern poets and the writers of the Bible. 
This difference is in the content of the inspira- 
tion. It would not be possible to make a se- 
lection from as many ancient or modern writ- 
ers as there are writers in the Bible and build 
up as consecutive and consistent and comfort- 
ing an account of man's relation to God and 
God's attitude to man as found in Holy Writ. 
In fact, the best thought of modern poetry is 
but the reflex influence of the Bible. The con- 
tent of the Bible is truly unique. Among the 
books of the world it has no competitors. It is 
preeminently the book of religion. It is the 
source from which the religious stream in liter- 
ature is fed. It is the sun which does not 
borrow, but lends its light. 3 

3 On the "Fall of Verbal Inspiration," see Reinhold 
Seeberg: Revelation and Inspiration, pp. 1-5. 



THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN 
REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 



VI 



THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN 
REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

"Christ never intended to shut up His Gospel in a 
book. . . . The only word that our Lord ever wrote, 
so far as we know, was traced with His finger on the 
unrecording ground. It was not His will that His re- 
ligion should be, like Islam, the religion of a book. He 
wrote His message on the hearts of a few faithful men, 
where it was not to be imprisoned in Hebrew or Greek 
characters, but was to germinate like a seed in fruitful 
soil." — William Ralph Inge. 

Revelation is one thing, the record of revela- 
tion quite another. As concerns the latter we 
have to do with man's attempt to fix the truth 
as revealed to him. However it might be said 
that man received the truth, whether by visions 
or dreams or unusual happening or in the quiet, 
orderly, ongoing of daily life, his record of 
that truth must be the result of a deliberate 
effort to make it known and appeal to others. 

The familiar illustration from Robert Louis 

Stevenson will serve to make this point clear. 

In his essay "A Chapter on Dreams" he tells 

us that while he slept at night a company of 

85 



86 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

little brownies came and kept converse with 
him, weaving the plots of his stories and filling 
in the details so that all he had to do was to 
write them out in the daytime. He had to 
write them out, however. The dreams were the 
revelation, the writing-out the record. "That 
part which is done while I am sleeping is the 
Brownies' part beyond contention ; but that 
which is done when I am up and about is by 
no means necessarily mine, since all goes to 
show the Brownies have a hand in it even then." 
Nevertheless, the actual record was his. "I 
am an excellent adviser; ... I pull back 
and I cut down ; and I dress the whole in the 
best words and sentences that I can find and 
make ; I hold the pen, too ; and I do the sitting 
at the table, which is about the worst of it; 
and when all is done, I make up the manuscript 
and pay for the registration ; so that, on the 
whole, I have some claim to share, though not 
so largely as I do, in the profits of our common 
enterprise." * 

There is a jest in this statement. Yet it 
contains the hard, sober fact, that man must 
make a record of his revelation by laborious 
effort. And because of his necessary limita- 
tions he is never sure that he has put down in 
the record all he has received in the revelation ; 
or that he can make men see in the record what 
i A cross the Plains: Biographical Edition, p. 226. 



REVELATION AND RECORD 87 

he actually perceived in the revelation. Man 
always receives more than he is able to record. 
His ability for comprehending truth is greater 
than his facility for making that truth known. 
No man can fully express himself. Hence 
revelation includes more than man can actually 
record. Truth appears in measured quantity 
to every generation and each generation for- 
mulates it and the good in that formulation is 
taken up by the next generation. So has reve- 
lation grown, even although we have not al- 
ways been able to note its progress. 

But there are other considerations as to the 
record of revelation. It may seem to be press- 
ing the word beyond its meaning when we use 
"record" not only to indicate a written word 
or a visible sign, as we might find on the rocks 
or in the heavens, but also any evidence of 
God's presence. This use of the word, however, 
is not only permissible, but necessary. When 
Jesus said: "The words I speak unto you, they 
are spirit and they are life," 2 He emphasized 
the spiritual, the invisible record of the words, 
and not the characters as exhibited in the Greek 
or any other language. Jesus' words were 
spirit, and no visible record could be made of 
that spirit. His words give life not because 
they can be spread on paper and read, but be- 
cause of what is back of and in them and which 
2 John 6:63. 



88 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

cannot be visually reproduced. Job speaks of 
the intangibility of the real record of revela- 
tion when he asks: "Who hath put wisdom in 
the inward parts ?" 3 And likewise Jeremiah, 
when he says : "I will put my law in their in- 
ward parts and in their hearts will I write it." 4 
The codification of God's law is in the inward 
parts of man and the record of God's revela- 
tion is written in the human heart. 

From the very nature of the case a written 
record of revelation is always something par- 
tial and perishable. This invisible record is 
alone adequate and lasting. Paul clearly in- 
dicates this in his second letter to the Corinthi- 
ans. 5 "Do we begin again to commend our- 
selves? Or need we, as some others, epistles 
of commendation to you, or letters of com- 
mendation from you? Ye are our epistles writ- 
ten in our hearts, known and read of all men: 
for as much as ye are manifestly declared to 
be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, writ- 
ten not with ink, but with the spirit of the liv- 
ing God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshly 
tables of the heart." "Who hath also made us 
able ministers of the new testament; not of the 
letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, 
but the spirit giveth life. But if the ministra- 

s Job 38:36. 

* Jeremiah 31:33. 

5 Chapter 3:1-3, 6-8, 



REVELATION AND RECORD 89 

tion of death written and engraven in stone 
was glorious, so that the children of Israel could 
not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the 
glory of his countenance ; which glory was to 
be done away: how shall not the ministration 
of the spirit be rather glorious?" 

Revelation, then, is spiritual, but its record 
material; revelation is eternal, its record tem- 
poral. The one has to do with the spirit of 
man, the other with the signs and images man 
undertakes to make. The first has to do with a 
message that has more in it than any one man 
or age can grasp, the second with the expression 
and interpretation of the message which each 
age must make for itself in terms of that age. 

There can be no discrepancy as to the fact of 
revelation. For as Eucken has well said, the 
essential function of a fact is to yield its living 
meaning to the present in some imperishable 
form; and it cannot do this unless it has a ca- 
pacity for development in accordance with its 
own nature and exercises in itself the life it im- 
parts. 6 Records of the fact, however, not only 
may be, but unavoidably will be, divergent. A 
rose or a lily, a sunset or a storm has a message 
for man. This message is a revelation. There 
is something here which Nature gives to man 
in the sense of impartation, that is, giving and 

6 W. R. Boyce Gibson: Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy 
of Life, p 41. 



90 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

yet, to a greater or less degree, retaining. Na- 
ture gives all that man can receive; it neces- 
sarily retains what man cannot take. The 
primrose by the river's brim remains to one 
only a yellow primrose, while to another the 
flower in the crannied wall holds the secrets of 
God and man. 

The distinction is always evident whenever 
two or more men undertake to record the revela- 
tion the flower or the sunset makes. The poem 
of Coleridge will differ from that of Shelley 
or Emerson, but the revelation in the heart of 
Nature is the same to each. None can exhaust 
the revelation or give it full expression. To 
every lover of field and sky the voice speaks to- 
day as it did to the poet of yesterday, and more 
is seen in the waving grain or the starried dome 
than any poem can possibly convey. 

"I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 7 

7 Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey. 



REVELATION AND RECORD 91 

The poem will inspire the devoted soul to see 
in nature what otherwise would not be seen. 
But in this sense it is only a guide, — although 
a most valuable and inestimable one. The poem 
sends us into God's out-of-doors and bids us 
take on our own account what it can in nowise 
give. The poem is a record of revelation, not 
revelation itself. However incomplete or unsat- 
isfying or even uncertain the record may be, 
the revelation remains as the fact having in it 
the source and the fullness of the life it com- 
municates. Nature always tells us more than 
we can repeat. 

So of truth. Philosophy, in its essence, is 
the same. Philosophies differ. In essence, 
philosophy is truth itself. In fact, philoso- 
phies are attempts to express and fix the truth. 
The one is revelation ; the others are record. 
Here again we see the fullness of the one and 
the partialness of the other. The eternality of 
the first and the temporality of the second ap- 
pear without bidding. Each thinker, to a large 
extent, is the creation of his age. Even al- 
though majestic souls have leaped the bounds 
of their time and projected themselves into the 
world of men not yet born, they were made 
by the conditions which surrounded them, of 
which they were a part, and out of which they 
had to take the very material for their struc- 
ture. Hence, when man undertakes to record 



92 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

his thinking he may be sure that it will not be 
perfect or imperishable. The record, doubt- 
less, will contain a certain amount of truth, and 
so far as this goes, it will be as true as though 
it were the whole of truth. The nearer he is 
to the heart of things, the larger his mind and 
the longer his reach, the closer he will bear in 
upon truth and the wider will be the area he 
explores. Rut what he actually comprehends 
of truth will be but a small portion of truth 
itself. 

So, too, in matters of religion. Lofty souls 
have a spiritual sense which keeps them always 
in the precincts of pure religion and undefiled. 
And faithful souls, by earnest endeavor, come 
into the same possession. Often are we helped 
by the influence of some strong heart and lifted 
into a religious experience which otherwise we 
perhaps could not reach. But here as else- 
where the revelation and the record are easily 
differentiated. The revelation is the dynamic 
force which out of life gives life ; the record is 
a static transcript, without power of its own 
to move for itself or upon mankind. Religion 
based upon a written word and confined to that 
word has no expansive properties and must re- 
main inert. To expand and have action it 
must be moved by a spirit which cannot be 
bound in the covers of a book. The robust 
minds of the Old and New Testaments empha- 



REVELATION AND RECORD 93 

sized this fact. Jesus and Paul did not allow 
it to go unnoted. So also do we find that 
"Plato long ago exposed the necessary limita- 
tions of the written word as a guide. 'When 
they are once written down,' he says, 'words are 
tumbled about anywhere among those who may 
or may not understand them, and know not to 
whom they should reply, to whom not; and if 
they are maltreated or abused, they have no 
parent to protect them ; and they cannot protect 
or defend themselves.' 'There is another kind 
of writing,' he goes on, 'graven on the tablets 
of the mind, of which the written word is no 
more than an image. This kind is alive ; it has 
a soul ; it can defend itself.' " 8 

Because there is more in the record of the 
Scriptures than men have been able to spell 
out in word was the allegorical method of in- 
terpretation resorted to. Allegory was defined 
by Heraclitus, in the fifth Century b. c, as the 
form of speech which says one thing and means 
another. 9 Men would not have hit upon the 
allegorical method of interpretation had the 
written word been able to give a real record of 
the revelation behind the word. Religious lit- 

s Plato: Phaedrus. W. R. Inge, Faith and its Psy- 
chology, p. 107, f. 

9 Interpretation of the Bible, George Holley Gilbert, 
especially Ch. I, is full of interesting matter on this 
point. 



94 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

erature would have been spared the fanciful 
and insipid subterfuges to get a meaning out of 
the Scriptures which was not there had the 
Biblical writers been able to clothe revelation 
fully with their words. This was impossible. 
Not only did large parts of it remain in its pure 
state uncovered, but men in different eras 
changed the clothing to conform to the newer 
style. The word of God remains unwritten. 
There have been many attempts to set it down 
in writing, but these have succeeded only par- 
tially. Even although they may be complete 
as far as they go, and be satisf} 7 ing and com- 
forting, yet there is too much in the mind of 
God to be grasped and fixed by the puny dic- 
tionary of man. The Logos still remains as a 
virgin content. There have been, there will be, 
many logos-doctrines, but no one, nor all of 
them, being man-made, will be comprehensive 
or exhaustive. Because the Word was life it 
became flesh and dwells among us. While the 
reach of intellect is too short to understand 
what this means, we believe that this Life is the 
Light of men and that 

. . . "the heart can apprehend 

A deeper purport than the brain may know." 10 

10 Edward Rowland Sill: The World's Secret, Poeti- 
cal Works, p. 136. 



REVELATION AND RECORD 95 

And because the Word is life we may be sure 
it cannot be analyzed. In spite of any advance 
the vivisectionist may make he will never be 
able fully to analyze the living organism. It 
is an open question whether the knowledge 
gained through the vivisection of an animal or- 
ganism will be sufficiently analogous for safe 
use in treating the human organism. As a 
matter of fact we can never know until the 
human organism has undergone vivisection. 
That this will be impossible we may assume 
from the indisposition of human beings to give 
themselves over to the vivisectionist. Living 
man does not want "a biology which is all 
necrology." 

Only a dead organism can be fully analyzed. 
Where life is there will be change, new adapta- 
tions, sloughing off the old. Life can never 
become static so that final observations concern- 
ing it may be made. It will always remain dy- 
namic. Strictly speaking, we do not know how 
it may behave and exhibit itself under differing 
circumstances. It has a tendency to adapt it- 
self to conditions and master situations. As it 
cannot be analyzed so also must its revelations 
remain unrecorded. What is put down hard 
and fast to-day may need to be changed to- 
morrow. Medical books become antiquated in 
a decade. Real life, the ultimate Reality, re- 
vealing itself to man, can never be caught and 



96 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

held in words and signs. Its meaning can only 
be approximated. The value of the approxi- 
mation will depend upon the degree in which 
man wills to put himself in communication with 
the spirit of life. He can give himself over to 
the contemplation of the poem, the painting, 
the sunset, until he is thrilled and enthralled 
by the truth underlying. So much the more 
can he come in conscious communion with the 
Spirit of all, who inspires the poet and painter, 
and who Himself is back of and in the sunset. 
The record of revelation is the attempt of 
man to give form to his conclusions of thought. 
Thought is impossible without formulation. 
All life pushes for form. Science gives us un- 
mistakable evidence that the early plant and 
animal life underwent a long period of striving 
after form. The jelly-like masses of living mat- 
ter strove with evident design to reach a skele- 
ton form that would give structure and purpose 
to the gropings of life. We find this to be a 
fact not only in science but in development gen- 
erally. This is a law well recognized in theory. 
It is only in practice that it is apt to be disre- 
garded. Thinking and observant men are quite 
ready to admit that we cannot get along with- 
out form of some kind. There never was a 
greater fallacy than the belief that any system, 
be it of science or religion or art or business or 
statecraft, could be built up without form, with- 



REVELATION AND RECORD 97 

out a well defined substructure. The trouble 
is not that we believe we can do without form, 
but that we insist upon form and then become 
encrusted in it, — take the record for the revela- 
tion. 

There are some of course who deride or are 
disturbed by the idea of doctrine in religion. 
They say let us get away from theology, it has 
served its purpose. We need not look very 
sharply to see that this very movement away 
from theology, so-called, is only a striving after 
form of another kind. Religion without the- 
ology, without doctrine, without creed, is as 
unthinkable as a human being without an an- 
atomical framework. Not against form in re- 
ligious belief should men be exercised, but 
against fixity of form, lifeless form, the form 
that grows around the outside of a religion, 
holding it in, hampering it, until the natural 
religious instinct in sheer revolt asserts itself, 
and breaks the outer casing. Form, doctrine, 
creed, must be an inner framework around which 
the breathing, living, lifegiving structure can 
be built. 

There is a great deal said in favor of science 
as against religion, as though science were free 
from, and religion bound up in, form. But we 
find here the very same striving after form. 
Every experiment ever made assumes in some 
form the law of gravity and of the conservation 



98 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

of energy. Without a full unwavering belief 
and faith in these two great laws the scientist 
would be such only in name. His very life — 
as a scientist as well as physically — is as de- 
pendent on these assumptions as the existence 
and vitality of man's religious nature depend 
on his belief that God is, and that God is love. 
And when we study these laws of gravity and 
the conservation of energy we find, not that 
they are supreme in themselves, having their 
origin in and limited to the field of science, but 
that they can be accounted for only on the basis 
of a supreme and independent being who oper- 
ates according to eternal laws and holds all 
energy in the hollow of his hand. They are the 
record of and not revelation itself. 

In the field of science as in religion there is 
danger of persistent clinging to form. There 
are scientists to-day who hold hopefully to the 
mistaken and misleading belief that a theory of 
evolution can in any way account for the origin 
of things. No man or school has been able to 
give an intelligent and reasonable account of 
the beginning of life, independent of an all wise 
and all powerful and all knowing being. And 
yet there are men who in steering clear of the 
Scylla of form in religion have been caught and 
held fast by the Charybdis of form in science. 
New light is shed on some great problem of 
truth as in organic evolution as a method of 



REVELATION AND RECORD 99 

God's movement, and then men take the form 
and try to mold all life into it ; or as in psychol- 
ogy when the mental and physical states of a 
growing child are found subject to tabulation 
and of great significance in determining what 
his proper training should be, and then the 
psychologist, seemingly losing sight of the wider 
application to life, spends his time with uncer- 
tain details and tries to force moral and reli- 
gious growth upon a procrustean bed ; or as in 
Bible study when the scholars found certain 
facts in the origin and development and tradi- 
tion of the Scriptures and then failing to rec- 
ognize their value in the constructive study and 
teaching of the Bible began to study details 
and to form untenable hypotheses as though the 
field of Scripture were a playground for the 
scholars and not the soil in which was planted 
the tree of life as a healing for the nations. 

We hear talk sometimes of Jesus as being 
utterly opposed to the Mosaic law and as usher- 
ing in a great reformation, as though He were 
opposed to form. It was not against form, 
but the incrustation in form, that He uttered 
His protest. Even an iron casting, He would 
have shown us, as it comes from the molder's 
form, needs to have life put into it before it is 
ready to serve in its appointed place. It must 
be chiseled and filed and smoothed and polished 
to get the marks of the form off it. Jesus was 



100 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

not so much a reformer as a conformer. 
He got the two great laws on which hang all 
the law and the prophets out of the mouth of 
the lawyer who was a master in the Mosaic law. 
Jesus' reply to him as he repeated the law was, 
"Thou art not far from the kingdom." At 
another time, when another lawyer asks Him: 
"Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal 
life?" Jesus answers at once: "What is writ- 
ten in the law? How readest thou?" And 
when the lawyer quoted the Mosaic law, Jesus 
said: "Thou hast answered right, this do and 
thou shalt live." To the rich young ruler who 
asked how he could be saved, Jesus Himself 
quoted the law. When the young man an- 
swered that he had kept the law from his youth 
up, Jesus replied: "Yes, but it has only been a 
form for you, you have never given it life." And 
this, giving life to form, was the one thing the 
young man lacked. It was this, too, that Jesus 
taught Nicodemus, the great scholar of the 
Sanhedrin: not that he must abolish the law, 
but that he must put life into it and live thereby. 
Even the little details of anise and cummin and 
tithing, of which the Pharisees made so much, 
Jesus did not cry down. He simply declared 
to them : "This ye ought to have done, and not 
to have left the other undone," to have found 
in the law a real libert}^ for showing mercy and 
doing justice and seeking the truth. 



REVELATION AND RECORD 101 

Jesus makes a true distinction between revela- 
tion and its record. He applies the law which 
we find in nature and in science to the progress 
of civilization generally. He came not to de- 
stroy what God had revealed to the prophets 
and law-givers of old, but to fulfill it by in- 
fusing into it His life. He who was most fully 
versed in the old law was best fitted to realize 
its new interpretation. This we learn from the 
brief account given us of Nicodemus u - and the 
full detail of Paul's life. They found the es- 
sential framework of belief, and on this built 
a structure that had flesh and blood and mus- 
cle, actualizing a life of service and sacrifice 
which gave life to others and gave it abun- 
dantly. 

11 Francis G. Peabody in his The Religion of an Edu- 
cated Man, p. 58, ff., has a striking paragraph on Nico- 
demus, the "cultivated gentleman, bred in the schools 
of learning," whose "scientific mind" was led away from 
the traditions of the law to the freedom of life. "Step 
by step the mind of the educated man has moved, from 
criticism to sympathy, from sympathy to sacrifice, until 
at last, precisely when many an untrained mind takes 
flight, it is the scholar who brings the rational offering 
of service as his answer to the message of the Christ." 
George A. Gordon: Ultimate Conceptions of Faith, p. 
152, f., has a similar characterization of Fichte, the 
philosopher, as he passes successively from Spinoza, who 
held him under "the domination of the material world," 
and Kant, who led him to fear that the "mental world 
is only a subjective dream," to the "ultimate vocation 
of man. He is finally a doer, and in this vocation he 
sets agoing within himself, and in the universe beyond 
him, all the bells of reality." 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
NATURE 



VII 

THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
NATURE 

"So far from dispensing with the need for a Divine 
First Cause, the theory of evolution, if only we have the 
faith in science to carry it to its conclusion, and the 
courage to interpret it, proves irrefragably that no evo- 
lution was possible without a pre-existent Deity, and a 
Deity, moreover, transcendant, non-material, and non- 
phenomenal." — F. C. 8. Schiller. 

By nature we mean the external world. As 
an unspeculative person, innocent of its deeper 
meanings, defined the term, nature is "all out 
of doors." Into this out of doors man is born 
and he finds it a continual source of wonder- 
ment. He alone of living creatures gives evi- 
dence of appreciating its marvels. A horse- 
man will wind up the mountain slope accom- 
panied by his faithful dog, and on some pro- 
montory where suddenly a scene of grandeur 
is disclosed, will halt his horse to drink in the 
beauties of nature. He will be transfixed be- 
fore the scene. The horse will not look upward 
but turn to grass, if any is about, and the dog 
will be concerned only in his master. To what 
105 



106 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

extent an infant is impressed with the glories 
of nature we do not know, although the roll 
of ocean wave will fill it with delight. We do 
know that there are some human beings so stolid 
and indifferent that they find no charm in the 
aspects of mountain, wood and ocean. But 
even they at times involuntarily are magnetized 
and feel the thrill. 

Nature calls and speaks, she has a message 
for all who will give heed, she is spiritually 
minded even as man is. Although it may be 
claimed that man reads into Nature his feelings 
and impulses, as he imputes to God human char- 
acteristics, we find no answer to the question 
what it is in the wooded hill or the rolling sea 
that stirs the feelings and impulses. Those 
who have exhibited a large degree of spiritual- 
mindedness have also brought forth from nature 
the deepest impressions of soul life behind her ex- 
ternal forms. We find that the musings of the 
poet come as close to the facts of nature as the 
investigations of the scientist. Some minds, 
given to coldly calculated comparisons, find in- 
terest in showing how the real poet and the pure 
scientist agree. They take delight in putting 
their conclusions into print. 1 While it is in- 
structive and satisfying to know that the poet 
can square his meditations with the axioms of 

i See for example, Sir Norman Lockyer and "Winifred 
Lockyer: Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature. 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 107 

the scientist, this knowledge is not necessary 
and does not help us to understand nature any 
better. We instinctively feel that the poet goes 
behind all the forms of nature down to her 
moods and discovers her real essence. He can 
feel her pulse beat. He need not vivisect her 
forms to determine how the blood courses her 
veins. He knows she has a soul. For not 
otherwise could she breathe into man the very 
heart of her life. 

If poetry agrees with science we welcome the 
fact. But we do not read the poem because the 
scientist can approve it. We read it for its 
own sake, because it gives evidence of a life 
which science, as such, cannot fathom. For 
this reason it is immaterial whether or not the 
first chapters of Genesis are true to scientific 
fact. Their message is deeper than scientific 
investigation or description can go. If they 
were based on scientific knowledge only, we 
should have to stop where the scientist must 
cease his labor, that is, at the point where he 
is forced to declare his inability to account for 
the origin of life. Over his pathway is the sign : 
"Thus far and no further." But the poet can 
pass right on. Out of the depths of his heart 
t he can delve into the deeps of nature. 

Nature has a soul. She is spiritually 
minded, we repeat. This is her record of reve- 
lation and is more clearly to be read than the 



108 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

prints of her presence in rocks and strata. 
The psalmist of old speaking of the Almighty 
said: "Thy way is in the sea and Thy pathway 
in the great waters and Thy footsteps are not 
known." 2 The sea can bear no imprint of His 
steps ; neither can the land. But to psalmist 
and to poet and to every impressionable soul the 
whereabouts of the Almighty are unmistakable. 
In the stilly recesses of the forest, especially 
where the redwoods tower hundreds of feet high, 
that soul is indeed dumb and blind which cannot 
hear the voice of the Eternal and see the work 
of His hands. And the forest is only one of 
the many places where we can feel and know 
God. 

"Therefore am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
And mountains; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear, — both what they half create, 
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize 
In nature and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being." 3 

But this is unscientific. We are permitting 
our feelings to manufacture our facts. We are 

2 Psalm 77:19. 

s Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey. 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 109 

finding in outer nature what we feel in the in- 
ner man. Yet the force that impels us here is 
without as well as within. We have discovered 
how to tell the age of trees by the annual rings 
they make. We say confidently that the av- 
erage life of a redwood is from eighteen hundred 
to two thousand years. But which is the more 
remarkable, the fact that man discovered the 
markings, or that the trees are so marked? Is 
it mere chance that makes the markings? If 
so, they serve a most useful purpose. They 
stimulate an activity in man which leads him to 
look for other evidences of law and order. 
This fact, with similar facts innumerable, has 
caused the birth of science. Knowledge is born 
as man observes facts and it grows as he makes 
inferences. His observation does not make the 
fact ; the fact leads him to observe. 

There were redwoods in the forests of Cali- 
fornia before the patriarchs were born. They 
must have had the same annual markings then 
that they have now. It is inconceivable that 
man was ever responsible for the marks. They 
existed even although Abraham or his fore- 
fathers or contemporaries did not know this 
fact. Such facts give man a stimulus to push 
his mind's quest ever deeper and further. He 
finds no frontiers in nature. Forevermore is he 
a pioneer exploring, conquering, and colonizing 
new territories. As Columbus moved westward 



110 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

by the impulse of faith and discovered the Amer- 
ican continent, so the argonaut moved toward 
the Pacific and uncovered an Empire. We call 
him the adventurer, not because he was wild and 
foolish, but because he was hardy and brave. 

So the pioneers in knowledge have made their 
ventures. They speak of the unity of nature 
and of the conservation of energy with the con- 
sequent reign of law and unmistakable order. 
Phenomena which man was able to observe led 
him to draw conclusions concerning the exist- 
ence of external facts. The further he pushed 
his observations the more was he forced to be- 
lieve in a single cause and a unifying source of 
all existence. The laws of the conservation of 
energy and of the unity in nature were un- 
avoidable ventures of the scientist's faith. And 
these led irresistibly to a further venture of 
faith which declares that the source of energy 
and the unifying cause of nature is a personal 
Being with mind and will and heart. 

The activity of such a Being implies personal 
and intelligent work. There is an impersonal 
and unconscious working seen in many of the 
phenomena of nature. The scientist speaks of 
chemicals and acids working when they are in 
the state of fermentation or effervescence. And 
there is a power at work here germinating and 
changing both solids and fluids as if under the 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 111 

direction of an intelligence and will. Of course 
there is no agent discovered at work and to 
the superficial onlooker no intelligence appar- 
ently is present. This spontaneous ongoing, 
therefore, has so impressed the minds of some 
observers that they have concluded the whole 
material world and finally man must have come 
into existence in just this way. That somehow 
matter got into a state of ferment and gradually 
the worlds were thrown hit a space, the moun- 
tains were piled up, the seas covered, lower and 
then higher forms of life emerged, until finally 
man was evolved. On this theory, according to 
Haeckel, man is only "an affair of chance, the 
froth and fume at the wave-top of a sterile 
ocean of matter." 

But this theory has such insuperable diffi- 
culties that it can be held only by one who has 
let the speculation of his mind make a bankrupt 
of his reason. What is matter? And how did 
it get to working? The exponents of this view 
never stop to answer these questions. Neither 
do they seem to note how inextricably they get 
bound up in their own phraseology. Matthew 
Arnold's well known definition of God that He 
is "the Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for 
righteousness," goes to pieces, on the theory 
of impersonal cause, as soon as we try to under- 
stand the meaning of his words. A single word 



112 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

in his beautiful phrase lands him where he did 
not care to alight. "Now what is meant here 
by the word makes? For the word necessarily 
calls up three, and only three, kinds of 'mak- 
ing;' either 'making' voluntarily, as a man 
makes ; or 'making' instinctively, as a beast 
makes ; or 'making' neither voluntarily nor in- 
stinctively, but unconsciously, just as an eddy 
or a current may be said to 'make.' Of these 
three kinds of 'making' which is meant ?" 4 If 
the Eternal is not a person then the righteous- 
ness which it causes is neither voluntary, in- 
telligent, nor conscious ; and hence it would be 
meaningless to man. Man can have no knowl- 
edge of that whichj is unintelligent or incapable 
of being made intelligent. 

Herbert Spencer said that "Evolution is an 
integration of matter and concomitant dissipa- 
tion of motion ; during which the matter passes 
from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to 
a definite, coherent, heterogeneity; and during 
which the retained motion undergoes a parallel 
transformation." 5 These words are certainly 
grandiloquent. Yet one of England's ablest 
jurists who is also a mathematician of note, de- 
clared publicly before a critical audience that 
"every important word in this definition is either 



4 Abbot: Through Nature to Christ, Vol. I, p. 44. 

5 First Principles, p. 397. 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 113 

unmeaning or wrong, and ought to be reversed 
or combined with its opposite." 6 

Science has many gaps, we are told. These 
gaps must be filled up with temporary hy- 
potheses constructed by scientific faith. The 
scientist must believe, for the time being, in 
what he cannot see. This we readily grant. 
But an hypothesis must make for mental sanity 
and intellectual order or it is nothing. We are 
ready to argue from the order and beauty and 
goodness that predominate in nature to an in- 
telligent being whose expression is order and 
beauty and goodness. But we balk when asked 
to believe in a blind and unconscious power as 
the responsible agent of all that we see about 
us, a power that can neither think nor will. 
We cannot deduce order from chaos, light from 
darkness, intelligence from unconsciousness, in 
a word, something from nothing. Scientific 
faith is not to be derided or disparaged. We 
owe too much to it for any such procedure. 
But when it is made to replace and to deride all 
other faith, it leads only to the darkness of de- 
spair, to that city of dreadful night where 

"The world rolls round forever like a mill, 
It grinds out death and life and good and ill, 
It has no purpose, heart, or mind or will." 

6 Lord Grimthorpe: Journal Victorian Institute, No. 



114 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

where man is ground "to slow years of bitter 
breath" and then is ground "back into eternal 
death," 7 where not a knavish brain, but a weak 
pair of lungs is the real evil, and where man's 
highest duty to the race is not to punish the 
vicious and criminal, but to weed out the de- 
fective and feeble. 

This is the world of a blindly and uncon- 
sciously working physical nature, and to this 
scientific faith run wild will conduct us. It is 
not the world of the God and Father of the hu- 
man spirit to which the promptings of man's 
inner necessities ever lead, the world of a loving 
and caring Father who is forever working and 
waiting for the manifestation of His children. 
My Father worketh, and He worketh personally 
and intelligently and for your welfare. This 
is the word of Jesus. And when we consider 
God's work, we say with all the confidence and 
with far more intelligence, what the early He- 
brew said: "And God saw everything that He 
had made and behold it was very good." Only 
the workman who has devised the plan and who 
is superintending its carrying out, is qualified 
to say whether or not the finished product is or 
will be good. We can trust his judgment. 

68, p. 291. See Frank Ballard: Miracles of Unbelief, 
p. 80, f., also Delo Corydon Grover: The Volitional 
Element in Knowledge and Belief, p. 159-167. 
7 James Thomson: City of Dreadful Night. 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 115 

"The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, 
Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, 

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things 
well enveloped, 

I swear to you there are divine things more beauti- 
ful than words can tell." 8 

In the early days God's presence in the world 
was felt through the indications of His might 
and power. The Hebrew writers set this fact 
forth in metaphors which will forever continue 
to impress and please the student of nature. 
The same is true of the great nature poets of all 
ages. In the beginning men seemed to be only 
conscious of the titanic power of the Almighty 
as exhibited in storms or earthquakes or water- 
spouts. They did not realize the energy be- 
hind every sprouting blade of grass or budding 
tree. The gently falling rain or the noiseless 
rising sun did not particularly impress them as 
evidence of God's power. Of the law of gravi- 
tation they had no idea, as the earth and not 
the sun was the center of their system. 

But they had a real conception of God's pres- 
ence in nature. They were as impressed as we 
by "the powers that make our whole solar sys- 
tem travel in space toward an unknown goal, 
that keep our earth together and awhirling 
round the sun, that sway the tides and rule the 

a Walt Whitman: Song of the Open Road. 



116 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

winds, that mold the dewdrop and build the 
crystal, that clothe the lily and give us energy 
for every movement and every thought — in 
short, that keep the whole system of things 
agoing." 9 Forever and ever man has found 
the universe immeasurable. We can have no 
conception of a million miles of space, yet our 
sun is 93,000,000 miles away and the farthest 
star we can see is a million times farther away 
than the sun. In every molecule a stellar sys- 
tem is discovered which, infinitesimally, resem- 
bles the solar system. Light travels 186,000 
miles a second, another fact of which we can 
make no mental picture. Yet the energy of the 
Almighty is sufficient to extend over the meas- 
ureless leagues of space and we on our planet 
have all the light and heat we need. 

And with all this power in the universe there 
is evidence of a firm control. We find order and 
not chaos. 

"He appointed the moon for seasons; 
The sun knoweth his going down." 10 

The power of the Almighty is in check. "We 
have begun to conceive of Divine action as uni- 
form, incessant, and general, throughout each 
and every region of the universe, however vast 

9 J. Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 4. 

10 Psalm 104:19. 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 117 

or however tiny, so that the infinite whole is 
animated forever by one immutable principle of 
life; and this conception we call, in common 
parlance, the conception of a government of 
law and not of caprice." n We need not fear 
that planets will go crashing down through 
space or that the earth will speed on uncon- 
trolled. 

Because order is discovered in the world of 
nature men have assumed that it is an explana- 
tion of the universe and due to the reign of law. 
But, as has been well said, "order is not an ex- 
planation of anything, but something that it- 
self calls for explanation." 12 In trying to ex- 
plain order we cannot stop short of the mind 
and will and purpose of God. The telescope 
and the microscope disclose order everywhere. 
The more we study the more we are amazed. 
As a great railroad system is a network of or- 
derly arrangement conceived and controlled by 
a master mind, so is the universe a system of in- 
ter-relation working as if mechanically in the 
orderly ongoing of things. But there is no 
danger of collision due to forgetfulness or mis- 
takes as in the case of the railroad. The far- 
seeing eye and the firm hand have all parts in 
control at the same time and "the Italian wind, 

11 John Fiske: What is Inspiration? in Darwinism and 
Other Essays, p. 115. 

12 W. K. Brooks : Foundations of Zoology, p. 287. 



118 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

gliding over the crest of the Matterhorn, is as 
firmly ruled as the earth in its orbital revolu- 
tion round the sun." 13 

The order in Nature issues naturally in 
adaptation. Part fits into part and everything 
has its place. "How well the structure of bone 
is suited to stand strains, how well the bird's 
skeletal and muscular systems are adapted for 
flight, how well the heart is constructed for its 
ceaseless work, what a fine instrument the eye 
is, how readily the leaf insects escape detection 
when they alight on a branch, how effective a 
contrivance is the Venus Fly-trap ! But so one 
might go on for hours." 14 

Of what good are the earthworms, we may 
ask. They have met only the contempt of man- 
kind. And yet they have had a most important 
part to play in the history of civilization. God 
has adapted the earthworm to the soils of the 
earth so that cultivation and growth could be 
possible. "By their burrowing they loosen the 
earth, making way for the plant rootlets and 
the raindrops ; by bruising the soil in their giz- 
zard they reduce the mineral particles to more 
useful form ; by burying the surface with stuff 
brought up from beneath they were plowers 
before the plow, and by burying leaves they 
have made a great part of the vegetable mold 

is Tyndall: Fragments of Science. 

14 J. Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 25, f. 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 119 

over the whole earth. There may be 50,000 
or 500,000 of them in an acre ; they often pass 
ten tons of soil per acre per annum through 
their bodies; and they cover the surface at the 
rate of three inches in fifteen years." 15 If 
these were not the careful words of the sober 
scientist we should begin to doubt. Instead we 
wonder. 

"O Lord; how manifold are thy works ! 
In wisdom hast thou made them all; 
The earth is full of thy riches." 16 

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the jour- 
ney-work of the stars, 

And the pismire is equally perfect, and the grain 
of sand, and the egg of the wren, 

And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, 

And the running blackberry would adorn the par- 
lors of heaven, 

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn 
all machinery, 

And the cow crunching with depressed head sur- 
passes any statue, 

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextil- 
lions of infidels." 17 

The orderliness and adaptation of God's ac- 

is J. Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 32. 

is Psalm 104:24. 

it Walt Whitman: Song of Myself. 



120 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

tivity in the universe make for beauty and pleas- 
ure. Every foot of God's earth is marked by 
His artist finger. Not only the aesthetic but 
also the patriotic is stirred in man as he looks 
upon the beauty of his own country. He starts 
across the Santa Cruz range of mountains, for 
example. He follows the brooks and rivulets 
purring by the wayside, he ascends to the red- 
wood crested summit and sees a thousand spires 
sending their vanes aloft, and Roman basilica 
and Gothic cathedral in perfect form silhouetted 
against the sky. Involuntarily he cries, 

"I love thy rocks and rills, 
Thy woods and templed hills." 

The beauty in Nature touches the emotional 
in man. But it is not by any means mere senti- 
ment which prompts such words as the follow- 
ing: "What inexpressible joy for me to look 
up through the apple blossoms and the flutter- 
ing leaves and to see God's love there ; to listen 
to the thrush that has built his nest among 
them, and to feel God's love, who cares for the 
birds, in every note that swells his little throat ; 
to look beyond to the bright, blue depths of the 
sky, and feel they are a canopy of blessing — • 
the roof of the house of my Father; that if 
clouds pass over it, it is the unchangeable light 
they veil ; that, even when the day itself passes, 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 121 

I shall see that night only unveils new worlds 
of light, and to know that if I could unwrap 
fold after fold of God's universe, I should only 
unfold more and more blessing and see deeper 
and deeper into the love which is at the heart of 
all." 18 

Yes, nature has its forbidding aspect. Two 
weeks ago the vegetable man promised to de- 
liver us some choice strawberries. To-day he 
comes with longdrawn face and tells us he has 
killed eighty-five gophers in his berry patch, but 
only after his berry crop had been completely de- 
stroyed. We build a comfortable bungalow on 
the side of a mountain overlooking a glorious 
panorama of nature which the most wondrously 
inspired artist with unlimited time at his dis- 
posal could imagine. A cloudburst, unan- 
nounced, hollows out of a V-shaped chasm one 
hundred feet and more at the top and takes 
bungalow and all around it away in a moment's 
time. We clear some land, build our house, 
plow our fields, set out our trees and vines and 
sow our seed. If left alone nature will soon re- 
claim its own. Weeds will grow through the 
gravel on the walks, witch grass and wild morn- 
ing glory will cover the fields, suckers and wild 
branches will shoot out from grape vine and tree, 
thrip and other pests innumerable will prey on 

is Elizabeth Charles, quoted by Charles F. Aked: The 
Courage of the Coward, p. 245, f. 



122 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

the fruit or noble branches until orchard or 
arched walk is denuded. The rose has its thorn, 
the wild flower its poison ivy, the pure white lily 
too often its muck. And here, where I am writ- 
ing, beside a babbling mountain brook, in a 
bower of redwood, oak, and elm, with birds all 
about gladsomely singing, and squirrels chas- 
ing each other in glee, the mosquitoes present 
their bills with an unpleasant rasp and I must 
pay the score! 

A word of Scripture comes to us at this point 
as a satisfactory and profoundly impressive 
reply. "Go forth and multiply, and replenish 
the earth, and subdue it." Man's task is not 
only to multiply in the earth, but to replenish 
and subdue it. There are lacunae to be filled 
and waste places to be reclaimed. And the very 
forces we can refer to as accountable for the 
desert conditions are also the factors which 
make wild the cultivated spaces if left uncared 
for. It is a man's job, this subjugation of na- 
ture. It is no work for the pessimist or the 
stoic. Neither the grumbler who stands up and 
lets his snarl be heard nor the indifferent who 
lies down and lets the world roll over him has 
a place in this universe. Nature has a call to 
man. When he listens he will discover it is not 
the call of the wild, but a call of the domestic. 
The world is not moving from order to chaos 
but from chaos to order. Cataclysms may be 



THE RECORD IN NATURE 123 

incidental to the movement, but the forces of 
nature do not prey upon man as something 
external and inimicable. All in all, they are 
beneficent in purpose and make man feel at 
home in his own world. They help him to ar- 
range his daily economies. As he goes to his 
labors he learns that 

"The world's no blot for us, 

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good." 19 

He finds the record of a working and construct- 
ive Spirit rather than that of an intimidating 
and destructive force. 

is Browning: Fra Lippo Lippi. 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
HUMAN LIFE 



VIII 

THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
HUMAN LIFE 

"The universe presents itself in man variously sun- 
dered and graded. It becomes all important to shift 
upward the center of gravity in his life, thereby ena- 
bling him to co-operate in the construction of the uni- 
verse. Without man's participation and decision, the 
movement at this particular point can make no further 
progress. What could be better calculated to give his 
life meaning and value than this possibility of rising to 
a level of spiritual freedom, to a life which, in the very 
act of consolidating itself, allows him to share in the 
fruition and development of the whole reality?" — Ru- 
dolf Eucken. 

Our knowledge, as Emerson has said, is the 
amassed thought and experience of innumerable 
minds. We fail to grasp this truth and to note 
that what we know to-day is the result of count- 
less factors and forces which from the ages have 
been opening up the eternal deeps of truth and 
fertilizing so much of the mental field against 
which the mind of man can react. This is one 
of those general statements which give the in- 
dividual in his work-a-day world but little com- 
fort. 

127 



128 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Man wants a principle which he can apply. 
He knows there is mystery about him. He 
knows full well how little he knows. He fails 
to understand nature. Much of it is harsh and 
forbidding. Often to him it acts cruelly and 
arbitrarily. He fails to understand the events 
of which he is a part. Why, when he is trying 
with his mightiest strength to do right, should 
it go ill with him? Why, when he is patient 
beyond endurance, trustful beyond the province 
of confidence, gentle and mild beyond even the 
last claim which meekness and humility can 
make, should it continue to go ill with him, 
should persecution be added to insult and the 
cross of Calvary to the crown of thorns ? Why 
should the deeps of the soul be finally forced to 
leap their bounds, and that last cry be wrung 
from the broken spirit : "My God, my God, why 
hast thou forsaken me?" 

On such a cross as this good and brave men 
have been crucified. The written and unwritten 
annals of life record many such instances. We 
read them in books and in the lives of people we 
know. We have said: Why are the ways of 
God so strangely inscrutable and so inscrutably 
strange ? 

"Oh, this false for real, 
This emptiness which feigns solidity, — 
Ever some gray that's white, and dun that's 
black — 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 129 

When shall we rest on the thing its elf , 
Not on its semblance?" x 

So the sea of faith seems to recede and leave 
the shore of life dry and sandy. The waters 
go out with the noise of thunder. We are alone 
in the ensuing silence. The horror of great 
darkness is upon us. 

But the gloom is soon dispelled. Hardly be- 
fore man has thought to consider himself alone 
and abandoned to his fate the tide begins to 
turn. The great sea rolls back upon itself : first 
the ripples, then the waves, finally the billows. 

"If I stoop 
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
It is but for a time: I press God's lamp 
Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late^ 
Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one 
day." 8 

This is the hardihood of faith, the principle 
acording to which man applies himself to his 
daily tasks. It is the faith which precedes rea- 
son even in realms wherein we think we stand on 
solid ground and can walk by sight. It is the 
faith that heralds knowledge as the shafts of 
light which shoot up from behind the hills an- 
nounce the rising sun ; yea more, which seem to 
pull the sun up out of his bed of darkness and 

i Browning: A Bean Stripe. 
2 Browning: Paracelsus. 



130 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

summon him to usher in the day. On the one 
hand man is sure he is helpless and ignorant. 
His intellectual activities when shut in to them- 
selves assure him of the fact. 

"This much is clearly understood — 
Of power does Man possess no particle: 
Of knowledge — just so much as shows that 

still 
It ends in ignorance on every side." 3 

But he is not ready to rest here. Just when the 
mind Goliath has seemed to possess the field, the 
heart David comes on the scene. 

"I stretch lame hands and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 
And faintly trust the larger hope." 4 

This living faith is the essence of our being. 
It is the record of revelation in man. We can- 
not reason until we have such faith. We have 
faith in the honesty of certain men and we rea- 
son that they will act after a certain manner. 
Here is the faith of reason which underlies the 
stability of social, commercial, and political ac- 
tivities. Even although we reason more or less 
on an uncertainty because the fickleness of men 

3 Browning: Francis Furini. 

4 Tennyson: In Memoriam, IV. 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 131 

must be taken into consideration, the principle 
of our reason based on faith remains. We have 
faith in the law of gravitation and on this faith 
we declare certain results to be inevitable. We 
are no more sure here of our actual knowledge 
than we are in the case of honesty. Because 
certain conclusions follow certain premises we 
have unshakable faith that such a progression 
will always obtain. And we reason freely on 
this basis. We see clearly that if we could have 
no faith in nature, this world would become a 
chaos just as surely as the stability of business 
would be undermined if we could not trust the 
men with whom we must deal. 

The difficulties of the age in which particular 
men live are not sufficient to shake their faith 
in the soundness of nature and reality. They 
believe the tide will turn and lift their stranded 
craft from off the beach. Every age is a diffi- 
cult age in which to live. We show a lack of 
historical perspective if we claim that our pres- 
ent era presents problems more intricate and 
more intense for our handling than problems 
of past ages presented for the men of those 
days. If the questions we must answer to-day 
seem more perplexing than the problems our 
fathers had to face, it is because by natural ex- 
pansion and the entering in upon rightful do- 
mains, our life has become more varied and com- 
plex. But it is the life up to which we have 



132 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

grown and of which we have the capacities to 
be master. The problems of the present issue 
out of the progress of the past. They are our 
heritage, and it is our privilege to solve them. 
The intensity and worth of the life we are living 
are indicated by the way we face obstacles and 
front difficulties. 

As we read of the trials and persecutions of 
the early Christians we marvel at the soul power 
they developed and the heroism they exhibited. 
And we fail too often to appreciate the source 
of their strength which enabled them at once to 
endure hardship, to master difficulties, and to 
live a life in that day which would be the avenue 
and the guide for the life of the morrow. Their 
source of help came from that intangible, im- 
material, power house which can be nowhere lo- 
cated, but whose dynamic currents are every- 
where felt. With these currents they con- 
nected, and thereby acquired the power which 
made them strong in heart. 

They were enabled to drive away fear. This 
fact cannot be too greatly appreciated. Fear is 
so dominant in the lives of men that a pessi- 
mistic philosopher declared heroism to be only 
the art of concealing fear. Men fear their fel- 
low men, they fear the elements, they fear dan- 
ger, punishment, misfortune, losses, unpleasant 
duties, difficulties, exertion, sacrifice, pain, death. 
We analyze fear and find that it belongs to the 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 133 

childhood of the race and the infant periods of 
the developed man. The soul trembles and 
fears because it has not grown up, because it 
has not gone out into the dark and boldly faced 
any evil supposed to be lurking there. In the 
early beginning the element of fear was the 
most characteristic feature of religion. Men 
were terrified by the expressions of nature and 
so these powers, which they knew could at any 
moment be hostile and fatal to them, drove them 
first to prayer and then to sacrifice as a means 
of appeasing divine wrath. 

As the thoughtful used their powers of intro- 
spection they began to see that fear has no 
place in the life of a man who had mastered him- 
self, and hence should not be a controlling 
factor in the religious life. So the best pagan 
philosophy, both in Greece and Rome, declared 
against fear as childish. "The happy man," 
according to Socrates, was "he who could put 
all fears and inexorable fate under his feet." 
But this view of fear led to a stoic fatalism ; a 
bold and too often a bragging determination to 
take whatever came in life, implying that only 
an inexorable fate ruled the universe and not a 
supreme mind and a loving will. 

The pagan philosophers, with all their sub- 
tlety and wisdom, had not learned that it is not 
will power in man, but perfect love which cast- 
eth out all fear. While they were developing 



134 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

their systems of thought and philosophies of 
life, the Jewish thinkers were setting down in 
imperishable words their ideas of fear and its 
relation to religion and fully developed life. 
"I will look unto the hills," one of their Psalm- 
ists declared. And then he said: "From what 
other source can my help come?" And his fel- 
low-men voiced the same question with its im- 
plied answer. So the heights about them be- 
came the hills of hope, their bulwarks, their 
towers of strength. The "fret not thyself" of 
the Old Testament and especially of the thirty- 
seventh Psalm is merely the abbreviated, the 
terse, way of saying: "Fear thou not, for I am 
with thee, be not dismayed, for I am thy God. 
I will strengthen thee, yea I will help thee, yea 
I will uphold thee with the right hand of my 
righteousness." And even the children sang: 
"I will fear no evil, for thou art with me." 

Here is a fact of considerable consequence. 
It indicates that man has been spurred on by 
an innate force. He has believed in himself 
because he could believe in a power stronger 
than himself. Dante found truth centered in his 
own being which he related to a higher and 
dominant Being. His beliefs were all colored 
by this fact. As he followed his beliefs he de- 
voted himself to their development. He sought 
truth wherever it was to be found and for the 
purpose of using it. He was not interested 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 135 

in truth only for its own sake, but for the 
measure it would give him to remedy the 
defects in his thought and life, and hence 
enable him to lead others into a fuller 
and more perfect life. He imbued himself with 
the writings of Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah 
because he found this written revelation of God 
corresponding accurately with God's revelation 
in history and nature. This he used as a ful- 
crum to move his own and subsequent ages. 

We turn to Milton and find a similar example 
of concentrated belief in righteousness and pu- 
rity. He believed he was "not merely the coun- 
tryman of Shakespeare and Cromwell, but of 
Homer and Sophocles, of Dante and Tasso, of 
Luther and Melanchton, — of all men who ac- 
knowledge the sway of the beautiful, the noble, 
and the right." He could write nothing not 
dictated by this belief. He saw the righteous- 
ness and love of God as declared by the proph- 
ets. He appreciated truth and goodness in na- 
ture and led these back to God as their source. 
For his beliefs he was ready to make any sacri- 
fice. Against the advice of his physicians he 
wrote his "Defence of the People of England" 
for which he paid the price of his eyesight. 
So we do not wonder that Wordsworth, two 
hundred years later, sang to him: 



136 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

"Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: 
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
So didst thou travel on life's common way, 
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 

Emerson was equally intense in his convic- 
tions as to the essential goodness and truth of 
the world. "Nothing shall warp me," he said, 
"from the belief that every man is a lover of 
the truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malig- 
nity in nature. The entertainment of the prop- 
osition of depravity is the last profligacy and 
profanation. There is no skepticism, no athe- 
ism but that. Could it be received into common 
belief, suicide would unpeople the planet." 5 
Tennyson believed so strongly that God reveals 
Himself in every human soul and his faith was 
so intense in the divine principle in the world 
that Jowett was led to say of him, "he had a 
strong desire to vindicate the ways of God to 
man." 6 

With Dante, with Milton, with Emerson, with 
Tennyson, with all the lofty spirits of the 
world's history, men believe in the righteousness, 
the love, the truth, that writes itself in and 

e Works, Vol. Ill, p. 263, f., in the essay New Eng- 
land Reformers. 

6 Quoted by Arthur Christopher Benson in his Alfred 
Tennyson, p. 114. 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 187 

through nature and hews out the destiny of the 
ages. And with them men believe that under all 
and in all is the God with whom the patriarchs 
spoke face to face, whom the prophets declared, 
and to whom the psalmists sang their praises. 

Men hold to their belief in God because it as- 
sures them of their sanity. Heine's well known 
words are not too strong. "The mere discus- 
sion of anyone of the existence of God causes 
me to feel a strange disquietude, an uneasy 
dread, such as I once experienced in visiting 
New Bedlam when for a moment, losing sight of 
my guide, I was surrounded by mad men. God 
is all that is, and doubt of His existence is doubt 
of life itself, it is death." 

Strong and forbearing souls resent more 
quickly perhaps than anything else the icono- 
clast in religion. They make a clean cut dis- 
tinction between one who tears down because he 
has means and material to build better, and one 
who destroys for the sake of destruction. Care- 
ful men have been led to the verge of un justness 
in their criticisms because they believed the 
positive note was lacking in the writing or 
preaching of other men. Carlyle, for ex- 
ample, has been regarded as purely negative in 
his thought. While we cannot endorse the 
statement, yet it is interesting to note how se- 
rious men will narrow their usually broad views 
in judgment upon others whom they regard as 



138 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

unsound in their beliefs. Carlyle "hates false- 
hood," said one of these critics, "rather than 
loves truth, and is a disorganizer of wrong 
rather than an organizer of right. His writ- 
ings tend to split the mind into a kind of splen- 
did disorder, and we purchase some shining 
fragments of thought at the expense of a weak- 
ened will. . . . His negative thought, 
therefore, can never become a positive thing ; 
it can pout, sneer, gibe, growl, hate, declaim, 
destroy; but it cannot cheer, it cannot cre- 
ate." 7 He was among prose writers what some 
hold that Matthew Arnold was among the 
poets. They shudder at the statement that 

"The sea of faith 
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 

But now I only hear 
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 

Retreating, to the breath 
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world." 8 

Even so appreciative a critic as Professor Wood- 
berry must reject Matthew Arnold's "creed of 
illusion and futility in life." "From a poet so 
deeply impressed with this aspect of existence, 

7 Edwin P. Whipple: Character and Characteristic 
Men, p. 120, f. 
s Dover Beach. 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 139 

and unable to find its remedy or its counterpart 
in the harmony of life, no joyful or hopeful 
word can be expected and none is found." 9 His 
Dover Beach surely places him "among the 
skeptic or agnostic poets." 

. . . "the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 

Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

Matthew Arnold's proclamation concerning 
life and destiny, and other proclamations like 
his, came from "the voice of a regret grounded 
in the intellect." And this is where men, im- 
bued with the thought of God's consistency and 
goodness, take issue with him. However fas- 
cinating the thought or seductive the form of 
his poetry, they will not bear with him. He 
sought to understand fundamental reality 
through his mind. "It is plain to see that in 
the old phrase, 'the pride of the intellect' lifts 
its lonely column over the desolation of every 
page" of his writings. 10 

9 George E. Woodberry: Essay on Matthew Arnold 
in A Library of the World's Best Literature, Century 
Edition, p. 853. 

io George E. Woodberry, op. cit., p. 854. 



140 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

That man cannot sense the spiritual world 
and know the things of God by intellectual striv- 
ing- only is one of the strongest proofs of God 
working in man. When man reasons he is apt 
to become metaphysical, when he prays he can- 
not help but become ethical. True prayer is 
the longing of the soul expressed in activity 
which undertakes, as far as possible, to bring 
about the answer to the prayer. It is useless 
to pray for goodness in life without trying to 
be good. The ethical outgo of life, therefore, 
is not based primarily on reason. It is based 
more particularly on activity incited by the 
emotions. The grand and impelling hymns 
which make their appeal through the religious 
art both of the poet who wrote them and of the 
musician who composed them are precious to 
every devout soul. They have their sway be- 
cause of the Gospel fact on which they are 
based. Back of and in them is a faith that 
holds supreme in spite of reason to the con- 
trary. The strong songs of Tennyson and 
Whittier and Watts and the Wesley s, to say 
nothing of the Latin and early German Chris- 
tian hymns, weave their strange spell over the 
intellectually minded as well as over the untu- 
tored. Others than Matthew Arnold have been 
unwillingly held by the charm of the Cross in- 
terpreted in song. 11 On this spiritual avenue 

11 The late Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren), writing 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 141 

and through the emotional vent men satisfy the 
cravings and longing of the soul. 

But the evidence of God in man is found not 
only in the faith that there is Reality in the 
universe consciously striving to realize goodness 
and truth. It is also and quite as much indi- 
cated by the practice we find among men to 
actualize goodness and truth. This we note con- 
tinually in the ordinary outgoes of daily life. 
Take the matter of social relationships. We 
are not all naturally inclined, especially if we 
are to receive no reward therefrom, to the help 
of others. Self-protection might well be called 
the first law of human nature. It has a won- 
derful expansive power, and from being simply 
a measure of defense, protecting one from the 
assaults or encroachments of another, it widens 
into a means of aggression and becomes a sys- 
tem of taking from the other all that can be le- 
gitimately — or in its worst estate, all that can be 
illegitimately — taken. 

Yet the very fact that in the awful stress of 
business and social competition there are men 
found who are true to their trusts, is an indica- 
tor the British Weekly, says that only a few moments 
before his death, Matthew Arnold declared the hymn 
"When I survey the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died," 
to be "the finest in the English language." Quoted in 
Christianity Vindicated by its Enemies, Daniel Dor- 
chester, p. 110, f. 



142 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

tion of the real character and soundness of hu- 
manity. Men and women are found in abun- 
dance who are not only faithful to the duties 
they must assume, but who also are willing to 
serve their kind without the expectation of re- 
ward. We could expect little of the coming 
generations if fathers and mothers should de- 
termine they would do nothing for their chil- 
dren without an adequate return. The future 
is safe because parents in a million homes toil 
and slave that not they but their children may 
reap the results. "I cannot save myself from 
this deprivation in life," says the father, "but 
to the extent of my power, I will save my chil- 
dren therefrom. They shall have the opportu- 
nities I lacked." Because of unrequited serv- 
ice parenthood is hallowed, and God is evidenced 
in human life. 

Of every real benefactor it can be said that he 
saved others but could not save himself. The 
countless barefooted boys and ragged girls who 
are picked up from the streets and properly 
fed and clothed and schooled through the bene- 
ficence of some charitable gift are saved in a 
sense in which their benefactor could not save 
himself. The man who helps to build a school, 
an asylum, a church, sets forces in motion for 
the salvation of generations yet unborn, when 
he himself can reap no benefit therefrom. 

Many of the masters whose productions in 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 143 

art or literature or music inspire and ennoble 
us to-day, received but scant recognition during 
their lifetime ; none of them full merit. Some 
of them lived and toiled and died rejected by 
their generation. They saved others, they 
could not save themselves. 

The hardy men who sailed unknown seas, 
plunged into tangled forests, crossed heated 
plains, and climbed icy mountains to open up a 
new country, saved in the past and will save in 
the future innumerable millions of human souls. 
What was their reward and what place have they 
in our estimation? Kipling answers in his 
poem The Explorer. After this stout heart has 
refused to remain where civilization would have 
afforded him happiness and plenty, and has dis- 
covered the new country and blazed the way 
amid hardships that almost took his life, he 
says: 

"Well I know who'll take the credit — all the clever 
chaps that followed — 

Came^ a dozen men together — never knew my des- 
ert fears; 

Tracked me by the camps I'd quitted, used the 
water-holes I'd hollowed. 

They'll go back and do the talking. They'll be 
called the Pioneers ! 

They will find my sites of townships — not the cities 
that I set there. 



144 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

They will rediscover rivers — not my rivers heard at 

night. 
By my own old marks and bearings they will show 

me how to get there, 
By the lonely cairns I builded they will guide my 

feet aright. 

Have I named one single river? Have I claimed 
one single acre? 

Have I kept one single nugget — (barring sam- 
ples) ? No, not I ! 

Because my price was paid me ten times over by 
my Maker. 

But you wouldn't understand it. You go up and 
occupy/' 12 

A few cities and streets named after Colum- 
bus and a World's Fair in his memory are but 
meager attempts to honor him worthily. We 
cannot pay our indebtedness. So with all the 
commanding men of the world's history, whether 
recognized as such in their day or not. They 
have left to us and to coming ages a heritage 
which never can be paid or fitly commemorated. 
Their unrequited service has made the progress 
of the world possible. 

The father and mother do not save themselves 
from deprivation and sacrifice because of love 
for their children. The missionary, the bene- 
factor, does not save himself from hardship, iso- 

12 Collected Verse, p. 21, f. 



THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 145 

lation, or the mere hoarding of money, because 
of his sincere love for humanity. Even the ex- 
plorer, after making due allowance for the ele- 
ment of pure adventure or even gain, is really 
actuated by the desire to advance civilization. 
And this is love : love that cannot be annihilated, 
that is not mortal, that has none of the features 
and elements of mortality, but is a perennial 
fountain of life, springing from the very deeps 
of inextinguishable Being. This love in prac- 
tice is what truth is in theory. Whenever man 
has received God's truth it has always been 
through his desire to work it out. Truth with- 
out form and substance is void. It must become 
flesh and be active. Browning sums it up 
briefly when he says : 

"Take all in a word; the truth in God's breast 
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: 
Though He is so bright and we so dim 
We are made in His Image to witness Him." 

Not the men who add to the quantity of life 
but those who deepen its quality are accounted 
great. Truth becomes incarnate in them and 
hence realizes itself in love. They witness Him. 
They bear conclusive evidence of the fact of 
God in man. Their lives count in the silent, ef- 
fective perpetuities of civilization and progress. 
The unseen power they exert enables them to 



146 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

influence their generations for good and is 
in kind the very power God exerts to accom- 
plish all His purposes. It is the power which 
enters into man and which he in turn works out. 
Paul grasps and fixes this truth when he says : 
"Work out your own salvation with fear and 
trembling, for it is God working in you to do 
and to will of his good pleasure." 13 
13 Phil. 2:12-13. See Preface, ante, p. VII. 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
HISTORY 



IX 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
HISTORY 

"The great proof of God's presence in history and 
the sole significance of that presence lie in the mental 
and moral realm. The slow moralization of life and 
society, the enlightenment of conscience and its grow- 
ing empire, the deepening sense of responsibility for the 
good order of the world and the well-being of men, the 
gradual putting away of old wrongs and foul diseases 
and blinding superstitions, — these are the great proofs 
of God in history." — Borden P. Bowne. 

Man, in the thought of his Maker, is not so 
much a human being as a divine becoming. 
Civilization, therefore, is not a product, but a 
process. This is true as we saw in Nature. 
From the time when the worlds were thrown out 
into space by the eternal movement until this 
present moment she has been at work bring- 
ing out new forms and perfecting the old 
ones. 

So man is in process of development. The 
dictum, "I think, therefore I am," must be sup- 
plemented by another : "I am, therefore I must 
develop." From the moment when man became 
149 



150 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

conscious of those stirrings within him which 
enabled him to throw out from himself whole 
worlds of thought even until now he has been in 
a process of development. And with nature 
he must continue this process. Initiation, de- 
velopment, perfecting, this is the order. There 
will be a continual breaking up of the old and 
the beginning of the new. These transitions 
will often be times of confusion and strife, 
when man will "hear of wars and rumors of 
wars," and when there shall be "famines, and 
pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places." 
But these periods of storm and stress should 
not cause unnecessary worry, for, to quote the 
language of Jesus, "all these things must come 
to pass." Again these "last days," the times 
of leaving the past and venturing out into the 
future, will be periods of absolute peace when 
development will be as quiet as the surface of 
a steady stream. Thus onward man goes, 
whether convulsively or gently; by revolution 
or evolution. In this ongoing we find the fac- 
tors that make for civilization in war, there- 
fore, as well as in peace. 

As war has played so important a part in 
the affairs of nations it must be considered in 
any discussion of the record of revelation in his- 
tory. Men have claimed that civilization has 
never been furthered by war. This thought, 
however, is only the child of the wish that it 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 151 

might be so. When we look at the facts we find 
that war has not only been a very vital element 
in the progress of civilization, but seemingly, 
from the human point of view, a necessary one. 
A drop of water, as the miscroscope shows us, 
is a huge battlefield where countless pygmies 
are waging war against each other. And this 
condition is but a miniature of our own world in 
its early stages when self-protection was the 
supreme law, and might was right. Even as 
we come down the corridors of time and enter 
the more spacious rooms of man's bettered con- 
dition, we find the animals of greed and rapac- 
ity and boasted strength still rampant. Be- 
cause man has been able only slowly to slough 
off the clay from which he has emerged, war has 
been a necessary sequence. 

In this inevitable condition we see the won- 
derful adaptive power of the Creator. For He 
has ordained that even the wrath of man shall 
praise Him. Where He has not been able to 
work with the best means, He has used what He 
has had. History has ample illustration of this 
fact, and there is nothing more suggestive in the 
development of mankind than this evidence of 
God's supreme patience with man's imperfec- 
tions and His wisdom in using whatever good 
there is in man. Egypt went out to fight Baby- 
lonia. The tiger in man was let loose. But 
good as well as harm came out of the conflict. 



152 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Pharaoh's armies brought back to the Nile val- 
leys not only prisoners and spoil, but ideas and 
impressions. And soon there began a work of 
adaptation and transformation among the 
Egyptian peoples. The Euphrates Valley and 
all the intervening country had made a positive 
contribution to Egypt's civilization. In turn 
the Babylonians were influenced by Pharaoh's 
men, for they too carried ideas and impressions 
which they could not help leaving behind. So 
wasi it in the case of Persia and of India. The 
successive invasions of the Greeks introduced 
their arts and language to sluggish peoples, 
disseminated wisdom, taught the art of agri- 
culture, infused a broader and better spirit. 
Greece itself was unified through war. And, 
making a broad jump over the intervening 
time, we find that the United States of Amer- 
ica owe their union and solidarity to a most 
bloody and disastrous war. However dark we 
may paint the picture of war, and however ar- 
dently our souls may long for the time when 
nations shall "beat their swords into plow- 
shares and their spears into pruning hooks," 
war has been a vital element in the world's 
civilization. 

War has not only carried civilization to dis- 
tant countries and made world nations of pro- 
vincial peoples and established or unified other 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 153 

nations and peoples; it has also inspired and 
nourished feelings and conduct that take high 
rank in the scale of virtues. There is, for 
example, the virtue of patriotism. We need 
not dwell on this thought. The very fact of 
our country endangered stirs heart-throbbings 
in the breast of every loyal citizen. 

There is also the virtue of heroism which war 
has inspired and nourished. Perhaps had there 
never been a clash of arms we should not now 
be able to appreciate what real heroism is. We 
say this without forgetfulness of the heroism 
displayed daily in all the battles of peace. 

"One dared to die; in a swift moment's space 
Fell in war's forefront, laughter on his face. 
Bronze tells his fame in many a market place. 

Another dared to live ; the long years through 
Felt his slow heart's blood ooze like crimson dew 
For duty's sake, and smiled. And no one knew." 

If there had never been war history's page would 
have been marred. One hero after another 
would fall out of account and the great names 
of the great nations which have in different ages 
pushed civilization to its then possible limit 
would be no longer the cherished heritage of 
our youth. We should be hard put to it to 



154 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

find a substitute that would keep alive the heroic 
spirit in their breasts and incite them to deeds 
of valor. 1 

We do not wish to be understood as saying 
that war must be continued in order to fur- 
nish us examples of bravery. We say only that 
war in the past has objectified the spirit of 
valor and ingrained the heart of civilization 
with chivalry and knighthood. Thus we have 
learned to appreciate the valor of a peace- 
ful era. For he is the great hero who, unher- 
alded and in the ordinary affairs of his daily 
work, will exhibit, not only on extraordinary 
occasions, but constantly, in the prosaic occur- 
rences of every day duty, those qualities of 
manhood which stand for truth and honor and 
sobriety, for fair dealing and brotherly love and 
righteousness. 

A third virtue which war has emphasized and 
furthered is that of mercy. We appreciate this 
seemingly contradictory fact when we study the 
influence of war upon civilization. As it has 
stirred the spirit which would protect coun- 
try, home, and honor, and has incited to deeds 

i William James: The Moral Equivalent for War 
(McClure's Magazine, August, 1910, pp. 463-8, also The 
Popular Science Monthly, October, 1910, pp. 400-410, 
Memories and Studies, p. 265, if.), is a most interest- 
ing discussion on war and the need of a moral equiv- 
alent. His substitute, however, as he himself confesses, 
is only a "utopia." 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 155 

of bravery on the march, in camp, and at the 
front, it has also revealed to man the deepest 
and most real element of his nature: that of 
unselfishness which finds outward expression in 
human sympathy. For what have the men of 
all ages discovered as they have gone forth to 
fight their enemies? They have found that 
the men over the mountains or across the seas 
were men as they were, that they had all the 
frailties and all the virtues of human beings, 
and that, therefore, they were brothers. 

It has seemed necessary at different crises of 
the world's history that men should go forth 
with the engines of war to learn the lessons 
of mercy and brotherly love and human kind- 
ness. We may admit all the torture that 
the sick and wounded and captured have suf- 
fered at the hands of enemies and the degrada- 
tion that has followed in the wake of every 
army when mercy seemed far away. Yet be- 
tween all opposing armies there have always 
been the interchanges of friendliness, and ene- 
mies in name have been brothers at heart. So 
true is this and so steady the development of 
this feeling, that mercy is now administered on 
every battlefield by an organized force, and 
wherever the cloud of war moves there goes 
also the sunshine of sympathetic ministry. 

War has also taught us lessons of monumen- 
tal importance in the conduct of business and 



156 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

commercial affairs. We have learned how to 
concentrate and mobilize great forces, what tac- 
tics and strategy are, what it means to carry 
on a world campaign, what is the value of the 
man behind the gun, what the need of con- 
stant and intelligent training amounts to in 
the real emergencies of life. These and many 
more facts that might be enumerated, show us 
that war has played an important part as a 
factor that makes for civilization. 

Yet war has not been the ideal factor for hu- 
man progress. It is rather to be characterized 
as an evil in the past to be shunned in the fu- 
ture. For when nations go to war they are on 
the defensive. All forward movements for the 
time being must cease. Commerce is paralyzed, 
ordinary pursuits are hampered, the arts and 
crafts hindered, the usual occupations of man 
abandoned, and undivided attention must be 
given to feeding and clothing an army and 
waging a winning fight. And the times of idle- 
ness for a large body of men which every war 
brings and the spirit of indifference which set- 
tles down upon so many would, if indefinitely 
continued, cause a most baneful result. 

We would not suggest, therefore, that war 
is the best evidence of God's presence in history. 
War is unquestionably a period of man's weak- 
ness when he is hovering around on the plain 
rather than climbing the mountain. The great 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 157 

factors that make for civilization are the di- 
vinely given means by which the Almighty in- 
tended man should rise to the heights. As 
we study these means, the mental, the moral, 
the spiritual faculties of man, we note that the 
real battle grounds of progress have not been 
on the blood stained fields of war but in the 
torn and tossed souls of individuals as they 
have struggled up into the light. God in his- 
tory is God in men endeavoring with single 
hand to overcome and possess and make habit- 
able the waste places in their lives. 

"For the race is run by one and one and never by 
two and two." 2 

Each time man, as an individual, has con- 
quered an inherent weakness or overcome a force 
of environment he has reached a "last day" 
where he could look down upon what he left 
behind and up to what was yet to come. He 
has actualized an ideal. History to-day is 
made up of the ideals of yesterday. And the 
ideals of to-day will be the history of to-mor- 
row. These ideals are the concomitant work- 
ing of mind and heart and will in man pushing 
for the betterment of conditions. Not bullets 
and bayonets, therefore, but ideas and thoughts ; 
not forced marches and pitching of tents, but 
2 Kipling: Tomlinson, Collected Verse, p. 241. 



158 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

steady progress in honesty and civic righteous- 
ness ; not men running out a battle line and 
throwing themselves at their brother's throats, 
but men drawing together their kindred, their 
neighbors, all whom they touch in the great 
world movements of the day, — this has been 
the trend of human advancement even although 
the picture has been brought out in the dark- 
ness and through disintegrating forces even 
as a negative is developed. 

History in the making is the record of reve- 
lation. We, of course, are too close to the scene 
to note this fact. Rut time defines the issues 
and clarifies the view. "In history we find 
great waves of tendency succeeding and cross- 
ing each other, and, by their ebb and flow, con- 
tributing more than any other factor to deter- 
mine the character of the principal epochs." 3 
These waves of tendency show clearly that man 
in spite of himself is not able to stem the on- 
ward stream of life as it irrigates and makes 
fruitful the field of human endeavor. They 
are the marked features of civilization as we 
study history. They, of course, are hardly dis- 
cerned while history is in the making. For it 
is given to but a few men in each age to see 
deeply and far. These chosen spirits very sel- 
dom have been able to make their fellow men 

3 Rudolf Eucken : The Meaning and Value of Life, p. 
44. 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 159 

see as they saw. The great seer has always 
been a lonely individual and very often a ridi- 
culed one. Men's views are made and colored 
too largely by heredity, environment and self- 
interest. Relief tends to fixity in form and 
men are not so much coaxed as coerced out of 
their opinions. 

We talk about getting the view point of 
those with whom we differ. In the critical con- 
cerns of life this is exceedingly difficult. The 
movements that grow out of a great national 
or political issue have a diverging and not a 
concentred line of procedure. The differences 
which caused our Civil War, to take only one of 
many ready illustrations, grew out of the inabil- 
ity of the opposing parties to understand each 
other. As a result "an irrepressible conflict," 
to use Mr. Seward's words, was on. The won- 
der to-day is that the actual combat of arms 
was so long delayed. Those in the South as 
well as those in the North who loved the Union 
and who would have saved it, were powerless to 
avert war. Even efforts made to avoid clash 
of arms had the opposite result. Clay and 
Van Buren in 1844, as probable opposing presi- 
dential candidates, agreed to publish letters, 
the effect of which, it was hoped, would prevent 
the vexed question of the annexation of Texas 
to the Union from becoming a political issue, 
and hence discourage discussion as to the ex- 



160 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

tension or restriction of slavery. But "the 
painstaking effort" "to eliminate this annexa- 
tion question from the presidential campaign 
had for its actual effect the making of that 
question the paramount issue of the contest." 4 

Even so far seeing a man as Abraham Lin- 
coln was unable to get the view point of the 
South on the matter of State's rights, as is 
evidenced by his recommendation that Congress 
buy the slaves of their owners as a practicable 
measure looking toward peace. He did not 
recognize that the ownership of slaves was only 
an incident in the reasons why the men of the 
South were waging war. That they were con- 
tending, rightly or wrongly, for liberty based 
on State autonomy and local self government, 
Mr. Lincoln failed to realize. At least so we 
are told. 5 

Here were tendencies in the middle period of 
our American History which were not discerned, 
except by the very few, and which caused the 
bitterest strife and enmity. It would surely be 
daring to say that, in the purpose of God, the 
Civil War was a necessary event in the prog- 
ress of our Nation. If we believed in an un- 
conscious will or a blind force we should have 
to hold to the reign of necessity and Matthew 

4 George Cary Eggleston: The History of the Con- 
federate War, Vol. I, p. 59, f. 
s Ibid, Vol. II, p. 9, f. 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 161 

Arnold's "darkling plain" "where ignorant 
armies clash by night." But as we see God's 
hand in history we note that He uses man as 
best He can. One of the Psalmists in describ- 
ing the attitude of the Children of Israel, as 
they were being led from Egypt to Canaan, de- 
clared that they had "limited" the hand of 
God. 6 Their critical attitude, their spirit of 
dissatisfaction and rebellion, made it impossible 
for God to deal with them according to their 
advantage. The keen insight of this ancient 
writer leads us to see how man necessarily hin- 
ders his own advance. In the conduct of the 
Children of Israel as they were struggling up 
from a worse to a better condition we recognize 
the conduct of mankind in general, and see how 
the hand of God is shortened, how He is forced 
at times to throw His blessings at us with 
difficulty rather than let them come gently and 
naturally. 

But even when the wills of men have been re- 
bellious and recalcitrant the purposes of God 
have prevailed. We believe that the union of 
the American States and not a confederacy has 
been a positive gain for the Nations of the 
world and hence for the progress of mankind. 
Whether this was the plan of Providence we do 
not know. Yet the result shows all the marks 
of a Master hand. This hand, according to 

6 Psalm 78:41. 



162 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

our finite vision, holds peoples together and 
makes nations more effective in furthering 
civilization. Somehow or other there is a law 
of the conservation of energy operative in the 
affairs of nations as well as in the processes of 
nature. 

No nation has ever died of dry rot and no 
conquered peoples have been annihilated. 
There has always been a remnant left out of 
which the same people were to reappear resus- 
citated or a new nation was to grow. "History 
gives us no clear case of any nation perishing 
from old age. It is altogether probable that if 
the Roman world had been left to itself — had 
not been conquered and taken possession of by 
a foreign race — it would in time have recovered 
its productive power and begun a new age of 
advance. Some early instances of revived 
strength, as under Constantine and Theodosius, 
show the possibility of this. The Eastern Ro- 
man Empire, under far less favorable condi- 
tions than the Western would have had, did do 
this later to a limited extent. The West would 
certainly have accomplished much more." 7 
The stream of life in any nation or age is al- 
ways strong enough to make a channel toward 
the main currents of progress. "Nothing is 
more evident from history than the fact that 

7 George Burton Adams: Civilization During the 
Middle Ages, p. 6. 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 163 

weaker bodies of men driven out by stronger do 
not necessarily relapse into barbarism, but fre- 
quently rise, even under the most unfavorable 
circumstances, to a civilization equal or su- 
perior to that from which they have been ban- 
ished." 8 

At times it would appear that the voli- 
tion of man was exerted to thwart the purpose 
of God. But here again streams of tendency 
are in evidence. The very episodes in history 
which caused so much dismay, and in which in- 
dividual men seemingly played a part far be- 
yond their own powers or importance, neverthe- 
less mark periods of greatest consequence. 
Judas had his place in the drama of Jesus' ca- 
reer as well as Peter or John. What the out- 
come of Jesus' mission would have been had He 
not been betrayed we of course do not know. 
We are able to make our judgments only from 
the facts as they are and not as they might 
have been. Arguments for, as well as against, 
Judas can be made by those inclined to specu- 
late on the reasons as to the cause and the 
consequences of his act. Mankind despises the 
traitor and on this account Judas has been 
painted fully as black as the circumstance war- 
rants. That he is inseparably identified with 
the tragedy of the crucifixion, however, remains 

s Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of 
Science with Theology, Vol. I, p. 310, f. 



164 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

a fact. History must take him into account 
and associate him with the greatest of the 
world's dramas. The designs of those who 
bribed him came to naught, but this must be 
attributed not to the inability of man to lay 
a base plan, but to the inherent tendency of 
the purpose of Jesus to prevail. 

Other illustrations serve us to show the in- 
trinsic adaptability of human strivings toward 
right ends and real progress. "Had the mon- 
astery at Erfurt deputed another than young 
Luther on its errand to paganized Rome or had 
Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel 
on his business to Germany, the seeds of the 
Reformation might have fallen by the wayside, 
where they had no deepness of earth, and the 
Western revolt of the human mind have taken 
another date and another form." 9 For our 
purpose the significant thing in construing 
these facts is that there has always been a full- 
ness of time when the onward tendency was 
distinctly marked. 

Of course we do not intimate that the act of 
Judas, or the mission of Luther or Tetzel, was 
necessitated by blind fate or the will of God. 
We hold, the rather, that God is in history 
through the instrumentality of mankind and 
that His ends are gained by the willingness of 

» James Martineau: Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 
113. 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 165 

individual men to see the right and do it. 

Ezekiel the prophet was thoroughly possessed 
with the idea that when men are under the in- 
fluence of the Almighty they will go straight 
forward where the spirit is to lead them. He 
had the insight of a seer and read the past and 
present history in the light of the future. He 
picked out the great leaders, such as Moses, and 
David, and Isaiah, and while he could not put 
his stamp of approval on every phase of their 
character and conduct, he yet saw that they 
were men upon whom the spirit of God rested, 
and that, in spite of their failings, they were 
powerful instruments which God could use for 
the shaping of His plans. They were men who 
came out of the whirlwind and the fire, as he 
saw in one of his visions, and "went everyone 
straight forward; whither the spirit was to go 
they went, and they turned not as they went." 10 

Because man is human, and hence frail, we 
are apt to judge his acts only in relation 
to himself. As Napoleon was campaigning 
throughout Europe during those two eventful 
decades he and his maneuvers were estimated 
only in relation to himself and his ambitions. 
Men were looking at him and waiting for his 
next move as though all that he did centered 
in him and had reference to him alone, forget- 
ting entirely that he might be only one of the 

10 Ezekiel 1:12. 



166 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

factors in the great march of history and 
that behind him was an unseen hand holding 
destiny in control. 

Yet we can understand Napoleon and his 
campaigns only as a current in the ever on- 
ward flowing stream of civilization. He was 
an instrument in the hand of God, — imperfect 
as he was, — and the great work he accomplished 
was to sow broadcast over the whole continent 
of Europe the seeds of liberty and equality 
which the French Revolution ripened. He him- 
self, no less than Savonarola and Columbus and 
Luther and Bismarck and Washington and 
Lincoln, heard an inward voice calling him to his 
task. The voices that such men have heard 
have simply been the absolute and irresistible 
conviction that they are called to do some great 
deed and they proceed to do it. They issue, as 
Ezekiel's men, out of the whirlwind and the fire 
and go every one straight forward whither the 
spirit is to go. That their deeds inure ulti- 
mately to the benefit of mankind is evidence of 
their divine mission. 

And so the great men of every age play their 
part also for the ages which are to follow. 
The voice that cried out against taxation with- 
out representation and the hand that signed 
the Declaration of Independence were quite as 
much the voice and hand of Alfred and Wycliffe 
and Hampden and Milton as of Adams and Otis 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 167 

and Jefferson and Franklin. The cannon that 
thundered on Bunker Hill was likewise heard 
beside the Thames, and fifty years later Eng- 
land, in the Reform Bill, secured the same rights 
of freedom for which the colonists fought. For 
the same imperial spirit that arbitrarily ruled 
over the colonist in America governed the mi- 
nority in England, and the Continental army 
fought not only for the freedom of those on the 
Atlantic seaboard, but also for the freedom of 
their brothers on the British Island. "English- 
men now understand that in the American Revo- 
lution you were fighting our battles," said Sir 
Edward Thornton, when Minister of Great 
Britain to the United States in 1879. 

The mass of humanity, of course, cannot ex- 
ist except as it is made up of individuals. But 
the significance of the individual has relation 
not in and to himself so much as to the mass. 
The part great men play in history, therefore, 
indicates the direction of the current. We can 
read the signs of the times as we read their 
lives. Sometimes it would seem that particular 
men are caught in the wheel of destiny and 
crushed so that the greater good can be rea- 
lized. The figure of Stonewall Jackson in the 
Confederate Army is one of the most austere 
and pathetic in human history. To many 
of his soldiers he was only a hard and unbend- 
ing man of religion who sucked lemons for dys- 



168 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

pepsia and ordered blind marches to keep his 
men moving. All this is relentlessly as well as 
realistically set forth by Miss Mary Johnston 
in The Long Roll. Yet his worth as a real 
man, his valuable services to the Confederacy, 
the tragedy and sadness of his death, 11 mark 
him as one of the consequential forces in the 
development of the American Nation. Indeed, 
at the dedication of a monument to his memory 
in New Orleans, the veteran Father Hubert 
prayed: "God, when thou didst decree that the 
Confederacy should not succeed, Thou hadst 
first to take Thy servant, Stonewall Jackson." 12 
While this is merely an opinion and does not 
take into account the figure of General Grant 
whose genius was marking him at the time of 
Stonewall Jackson's death as the only man ca- 
pable of leading the Federal forces to victory, 
yet we cannot put away the conviction that 
the fate of the great Confederate General had 
much to do with the final outcome of the Civil 
War. 

God is in history. The record of His revela- 
tion is on every epoch and era of advancement. 

n He was shot, as is well known, by his own men 
through an almost unavoidable blunder. His last words 
were: "Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action. Pass 
the infantry to the front." Then a little later: "No; 
let us pass over the river, and rest under the shade of 
the trees." 

12 Carl Hovey: Stonewall Jackson, p. 1,28. 



THE RECORD IN HISTORY 169 

We could not understand the progress of the 
race if we were shut up in our study to deeds 
of men and women uninfluenced by divine power. 
He who has a vision of the Eternal must see 
Him leading out His ministers from the whirl- 
wind and the fire and sending them straight for- 
ward where His spirit is to go. There is an 
inwardness in the events of history that makes 
itself felt as we look back over the years and 
centuries. The stream of progress is never 
stopped. There may be, as there have been, the 
eddies and counter currents, and even at times 
a backward movement. But, as the Euphrates 
river of old, winding in and out, often turn- 
ing back upon itself, nevertheless reached 
the sea, so do we find that the general direc- 
tion of the human stream of life has been on- 
ward. The currents underneath have made for 
progress. These currents have been the under- 
lying forces that hold men, as individuals and 
as nations, to the real in life. God has been 
in history not in any outward sense but in an 
inner sovereignty, the very heart and soul of 
the great movements that have made for truth 
and righteousness and betterment. 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
MUSIC AND THE FINE ARTS 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
MUSIC AND THE FINE ARTS 

"Art is the tender human servant that man has made 
himself for his solace. He has adjusted it to his facul- 
ties and restrained it within his scope; fashioning it 
from the infinite substance, he has impressed upon it 
finite form. It is a voice less thunderous than nature's, 
a lamp that does not dazzle like the great sun. It sim- 
plifies the wealth that is too luxuriant, and makes tan- 
gible a fragment of the great ethereal beauty no mortal 
can grasp. Thus art is visible and audible Tightness; 
it is the love of God made manifest to the senses, a 
particular symbol of a universal harmony." — Daniel 
Gregory Mason. 

Art in its general sense includes every effort 
by man to express emotion. It is the exhibition 
of human susceptibility to the true, the beau- 
tiful, the good; and the evidence of human 
skill to portray and fix the virtuous and aes- 
thetic inclinations of man. Its field is music, 
the fine arts and literature, for each one of these 
expressions of the emotional is, in the wider 
sense, an art. Art, especially in music and the 
visible forms, is so closely allied with the truly 
173 



174 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

religious that it has always been regarded as 
a sort of religious sense divining and express- 
ing truth which all men feel but cannot under- 
stand or express. It is peculiarly the activity 
of man under the direction and influence of a 
mightier power. This power we identify with 
God and hence find in art a record of revela- 
tion. In this chapter we confine ourselves to 
music and the fine arts. 

Pericles speaks of the "Music of the Spheres," 
expressing in this phrase a conviction that na- 
ture has a soul and that this soul is attuned to 
harmony. Byron said: 

"Therms music in the sighing of a reed, 
There's music in the gushing of a rill, 
There's music in all things, if men have ears, 
This earth is but an echo of the spheres." 

Men have had ears and they have heard the 
voices of melody and harmony and rhythm, the 
natural inflection of fury and fear and joy and 
peace and love. All varieties of expression 
has nature produced. The forests sing their 
symphonies ; the mountains give forth their pas- 
sions ; the valleys reverberate their oratorios ; 
the brooks and the streams laugh in rippling 
cadences or flow in silent reveries ; the seas 
roar ; the floods clap their hands ; the hills break 
out into singing. 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 175 

Man hears the symphonic drama which na- 
ture is skillful to render. The grand recitative, 
the animated chord, the realistic power of har- 
mony, and the surprising effects of instrumen- 
tation are all found in nature. "See deep 
enough," said Carlyle, "and you see musically, 
the heart of nature being everywhere music, if 
you can only reach it." Great souls have tried 
to reach it, for they have instinctively felt that 
God's world, to use Bushnell's fine phrase, "is 
a soundingboard for the heart." Babylonia, 
Egypt, China, Arabia, — all lands and peoples 
have made effort to fathom the deep mysteries 
of earth's harmony. Civilization has marched 
to the tune of music whether the note was crude 
or cultured. Orpheus had the power of charm- 
ing all animate and inanimate objects with his 
sweet lyre. Arion, the famous player upon the 
cithara, when thrown into the sea by the sail- 
ors, was saved by the dolphins which had gath- 
ered about the ship to listen to his lyre. These 
two legends show us how the Greeks personified 
music. Coming down through later times we 
find the same emphasis placed upon harmony 
and rhythm as the soul of man expresses the soul 
of nature. The master-singers and the minne- 
singers and the minstrels have sung in the open 
air and in the court, in the hall and in the 
sanctuary, subduing strife and envy and pas- 
sion, touching the melodies of the human soul till 



176 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

it sang the joyous, happy, irresistible ballad 
of love. 

We turn to Holy Writ and find the influence 
of music upon man set forth in poetic imagery 
— an imagery so irresistible as to lead us at 
times to read fancy as fact. At the dawn of 
creation we are told the morning stars sang to- 
gether and all the sons of God shouted for joy. 
When the Israelites had passed safely out of 
the bondage of Egypt, Miriam, the prophetess, 
took a timbrel in her hand and all the women 
went out after her with timbrels and with 
dances and they sang a song of triumph to 
the Lord. When Jabin and Sisera, the ene- 
mies of Israel, were discomfited and put to 
rout, Deborah and Barak sang praises unto 
the Lord for His mighty victory. 

When David returns, exulting from his tri- 
umphs over the Philistines, the women came out 
of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing 
to meet him with tabrets, with joy and with 
instruments of music, and they answered one 
another as they played: 

"Saul hath slain his thousands, 
And David his ten thousands." 

When David, the King, brings the Ark of the 
Covenant of the Lord to the City of David, he 
dances before the Ark with all his might and 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 177 

all the house of Israel accompanies him with 
shouting and with the noise of the trumpet. 
And hear the grand recitative they sing: 

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, 

And be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors, 

And the King of Glory shall come in! 

Who is the King of Glory f 

The Lord, strong and mighty, 

The Lord, mighty in battle. 

Lift up your heads, O ye gates, 

Even lift them up ye everlasting doors, 

And the King of Glory shall come in. 

Who is the King of Glory? 

The Lord of Hosts, 

He is the King of Glory." 

When Mary, who has a vision of the Christ, 
visits her cousin Elizabeth, the latter is filled 
with the Holy Spirit and sings with a loud 
voice : 

"Blessed art thou among women." 
And Mary takes up the response and sings : 

"My soul doth magnify the Lord 
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour; 
For he hath regarded the low estate of his hand- 
maiden. 
Holy is his name." 



178 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

On the night when the shepherds kept watch 
over their flocks, the glory of the Lord shone 
round about them and suddenly the angels of 
heaven broke forth with joy and a multitude of 
the heavenly host was praising the Lord and 
saying : 

"Glory to God in the highest, 

And on earth peace, good will to men." 

In the tragedy which stained the page of his- 
tory with a blot of carmine, the very deeps of 
the earth thundered forth their passion, so that 
mountain and valley trembled and the granite 
of the hills was rent. 

In the vision which John had on Patmos, he 
beheld and lo a great multitude, which no man 
could number, of all nations, and kindreds and 
peoples and tongues, bowed before the throne 
and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes 
and with palms in their hands and they sang 
with a loud voice saying: 

"Salvation to our God, which sitteth upon the 
throne and unto the Lamb." 

And the angels took up the chorus and sang: 

"Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and 
thanksgiving and honor and power and might be 
unto our God forever and forever." 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 179 

And a voice came out of the throne, saying : 

"Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that 
fear him, both great and small." 

And then there was heard, as it were, the voice 
of a great multitude as the voice of many 
waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, 
saying: 

"Hallelujah, Hallelujah, for the Lord God Om- 
nipotent reigneth, let us be glad and rejoice and 
give honor to Him." 

This is the spirit of music in man, which the 
inspiration of the Almighty giveth understand- 
ing. To some He giveth more than others, for 
there are souls born with all the music of heaven 
and earth throbbing in them, eager for expres- 
sion. But to all He gives some. There is 
none too poor in soul responsiveness and sus- 
ceptibility not to be stirred by the beautiful 
forms of expression which lead us, as Carlyle 
says, to the edge of the infinite and let us for 
a moment gaze into its depths. 

Our life is set to music. When sad, it is a 
dirge, when happy, a pagan. Beethoven put 
"his sorrow into sonatas" and Schubert his 
joy into song. The peasant, sitting in his 



180 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

kitchen, hears the clock tick, the teakettle hum, 
the logs purr as they burn, and consciously or 
unconsciously his soul is touched, he has solace 
which wealth could not buy. The more cul- 
tured man longs for "the ablution and inunda- 
tion of musical waves" and goes where he can 
bathe his soul in the stream of harmony, when, 
as Emerson says, with the first note of the flute 
or hom or the first strain of a song, he quits 
the world of sense and launches on the sea of 
ideas and emotion. For music untwists 

"All the chains that tie the hidden soul of harmony." 

Our moods fit into that of music. The babe 
falls to sleep to the soothing lullaby of its 
mother ; the old man hears the notes of love and 
is j^oung again, roaming the woods and the 
meadow hand-in-hand with his heart's desire; 
the soldier tramps to the sound of music and 
hardly knows he is tired; the sailor circles the 
capstan and with his "ho-heave-o" hauls up 
the ton of steel as a f eatherweight ; the aged 
couple sit in their lonely cabin and have visions 
of heaven and home where there will be neither 
want nor sorrow nor tears, as some sweet-voiced 
singer brings the angels trailing clouds of glory 
into the room. The soul that is bereft of a 
loved one takes courage as the sweet and ten- 
der notes alleviate and bind up the wounds and 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 181 

is strengthened to say: "Though He slay me 
yet will I trust Him." 

As the soul is thus stirred to its depths it is 
brought face to face with its real likeness. 
Spirit with spirit meets. God communicates 
with man and man communes with God. Hence 
is harmony the true note of religion, and hence 
has music played so prominent a role in re- 
ligion. 

The inspiration of the Almighty gave the 
prophet of old understanding and he instituted 
a divine service of music and set up the Levites 
in the house of God with cymbals and psalteries 
and harps, and "the Levites and the priests 
praised the Lord day by day, singing with loud 
instruments unto the Lord." God ordained 
that through music the eyes of the seer be 
opened. The spirit of prophecy fell upon Saul 
when he met the school of the prophets coming 
down a hill with psaltery and a tabret and a 
pipe and a harp before them. Elisha said: 
"Bring me a minstrel," and it came to pass 
that when the minstrel played the hand of 
the Lord came upon Elisha. Through music 
the soul has been led from darkness into light. 
"When the evil spirit from the Lord came upon 
Saul David took a harp and played with his 
hand, so Saul was refreshed and was well and 
the evil spirit departed from him." Browning 
has taken this incident to show the power of 



182 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

music to lead us to see the highest ideal. With 
a vision of the Christ the poet brings the perish- 
ing King to life. So prophecy and psalmody 
and poetry are set to music, man joins the 
choir of heaven and sings unto the Lord; he 
makes a jo} 7 ful noise unto Him who is his King. 
With the help of music life becomes a melody 
and living a thanksgiving. 

In the fine arts, also, we discover the record of 
revelation. The work of brush and pen and 
chisel fastens the ideal of artistic values. In 
music man is inspired to fix the harmony of na- 
ture and appeals to the noblest in his fellow-man 
through the ear. In art, — using the word in its 
limited sense, — man is inspired to fix the order 
of nature and appeals to the aesthetic in his 
fellow-man through the eye. This order the 
artist does not find bound as by a decree, but 
free and untrammeled. It is restrained only 
as the star in its orbit or the river in its chan- 
nel. As we look at the star or the river we 
think not of restraint, but of a Creator who 
made the marvels of nature. Both the star 
and the river appeal to us as free. Only when 
we begin to study this freedom and try to ac- 
count for the wonder do we discover the neces- 
sary restraint underlying. This restraint is 
the order of nature ; the order which holds and 
inspires the artist and which he tries to repro- 
duce. Its essential characteristics are beauty 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 183 

and unity; and man in spite of himself feels he 
can be free only as he conforms himself to the 
order of nature and expresses himself in beauty 
and unity. "In the best music, painting, 
poetry, building, sculpture, man is the being 
that he fails to be in the actual world." 1 This 
is the ideal in all art, the goal of man's striv- 
ing. As in music, therefore, so also in paint- 
ing and sculpture and architecture, there is a 
spirit in man which the inspiration of the Al- 
mighty giveth understanding. 

Bezaleel, the artist and architect of the taber- 
nacle and the ark of the Lord, we read, was 
filled with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in un- 
derstanding, in knowledge and in all manner 
of workmanship to devise curious works, to work 
in silver and in gold and in brass and in the 
cuttincr of stones to set them and in the carv- 
ing of wood to make any manner of cunning 
work. God put this talent and this skill in 
his heart so that he could teach others also to 
be cunning, that is, adept and dexterous to do 
the work of the engraver, the embroiderer and 
the weaver. 2 The beauty and pleasing in- 
tricacy of the curtains and the bars, of the 
candlesticks with their lamps and reflectors, of 
the altar of incense, the pillars with their hooks, 

i George A. Gordon: Ultimate Conceptions of Faith, 
p. 159. 

2 Exodus 35:30-35. 



184 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

the chapiters with their fillets of gold and sock- 
ets of brass, the table with the vessels of sac- 
rifice and anointing, especially the mercy-seat 
with the cherubim, — all these wondrous works 
of art gave the idea and inspiration for the 
magnificent temple of Solomon reared decades 
later with its foundation and pillars and beams 
and arches of immense stones and wood, inlaid 
everywhere with checkerwork and wreaths and 
chains in gold and silver and brass, and chapi- 
ters with pomegranate decoration and archi- 
traves with delicately wrought lily ornamenta- 
tion, which even after the vicissitudes of the 
centuries called forth continual exclamations 
of awe and delight. 

It is not necessary to draw attention to the 
fact that this art was in the service of religion. 
As in Israel, so everywhere, art had a religious 
inception. These two, art and religion, as well 
as music and religion, started hand in hand and 
continued close companions. What would seem 
trivial to us in artistic value had a tremendous 
significance and impulse on the art side for reli- 
gion. The religious instinct of man has in- 
vested the crudest forms, — such as the black 
Kaaba stone at Mecca or the sandstone and 
granite monoliths at Stonehenge, — with reli- 
gious significance. This religious element, 
among some peoples more slowly, among others 
more rapidly, developed the artistic form and 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 185 

expression. And although all nations did not 
advance to what we would term an artistic ideal, 
they all in some form or other sought to give 
artistic expression to the religious impulse and 
motive. 

In Babylon, in Egypt, in Palestine, the art- 
ist wrought for the gods, seeking to rear for 
them houses or temples which would be worthy 
for their indwelling. This is true also of 
Greece, especially of the early artists as they 
reared the Parthenon or carved the statue of 
Jupiter. The Jews had an aversion to giving 
bodily representation to the sacred. This ac- 
counts for the fact that they never reached a 
high form of artistic expression. Measured by 
the art of other peoples they fall far below 
artistic standards. This is true in a less de- 
gree also of the Babylonians who, like the Jews, 
belonged to the Semitic race. There was very 
little religious demonstration among them in 
plastic form or color. They represented their 
gods or demons in bas-relief or in lines crudely 
marked out on soft clay or chiseled in hard 
granite. Their religion, like that of the Jews, 
was rather a matter of the spirit than of the 
sense, — "an image in the mind rather than an 
image in metal or stone." 

But when we come to the Egyptians, we find 
their temples eloquent with the actions and 
deeds of the gods. They deified everything 



186 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

from the Pharaoh down to animals and inani- 
mate objects. This was all represented in 
pictures. The landscape of Egypt is covered 
with temples and towers and tombs and pyra- 
mids. They all have religious significance. 
They are all gorgeously but beautifully deco- 
rated. In the day of its vigor Egypt was an 
artistic dream. "The lotus capitals, the frieze 
and architrave, all glowed with bright hues, 
and often the roof ceiling was painted in blue 
and studded with golden stars." The wonder 
of the world is the marvelously drawn and col- 
ored representations that have been and are 
being brought to light in the tombs of the 
kings. These pictures on walls inside and out 
will thrill travelers for decades to come. 

The religious element in Greek art is also 
noticeable in its earliest forms. The first rep- 
resentations of temple images and offerings are 
in the shape of fetishes or logs of wood un- 
couthly carved or designed. These were sym- 
bols of the divinity, — the expression of that 
spirit in man which would reach out and not 
only grasp that great spirit, but objectify it. 
Even in this primitive state art must have ren- 
dered great service to religion. As the inspi- 
ration of the Almighty began to give the Greek 
artist understanding, and he began to assert 
his capacity to render "the human form divine" 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 187 

in a more adequate manner, art "was immedi- 
ately enlisted in the service of religion ; and we 
should miss entirely the spirit of Greek sculp- 
ture during its earlier period, if we failed to 
realize that almost every work which it produced 
was in one way or another intended for reli- 
gious dedication." 3 Phidias, the greatest art- 
ist of Athens, represented the patron goddess 
in his chrys-elephantine statue which was set 
up as a worthy embodiment of Athena in her 
own Parthenon. His statue of the father of 
the gods, Zeus, represented the noblest form 
of divine power and perfection so that it had a 
religious and uplifting influence on all behold- 
ers. The highest type of Greek art was the 
visual representation of the virtues as personi- 
fied by the Greek mind. This was not the high- 
est type of spirituality, but it was significant 
as showing the inner relation of art and re- 
ligion. 

In Italy the religious motive in art rules. 
It is different, however, from that of Egypt or 
Greece. There the "faith was a worship of 
nature, a glorification of humanity, an exalta- 
tion of physical and moral perfection. " Art 
dealt with the tangible, it appealed to the sensu- 
ous, the earthy nature of mankind. But in 

3 Ernest Gardiner: A Handbook of Greek Sculpture, 
p. 81. 



188 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Italy, after the era of Christianity gave the 
world a Christ who could be represented in 
bodily form without any thought of sacrilege, 
the inspiration and the service of art for ob- 
jectifying the religious spirit reached their 
height. The sensualism of the Greek artist 
gave way to the spirituality of the Italian. 
This can be traced in all the forms of art. Not 
only have we the Christ represented in the 
Madonnas, the Adoration, the Transfiguration, 
the Scourging, the Crucifixion, the Descent 
from the Cross and the Ascension into Heaven, 
but all the saints, apostles, martyrs, have been 
actualized upon the canvas for religious pur- 
pose. 

These representations were to find lodgment 
in churches. So churches were built by men 
"moved by a true fervor of religious faith." 
The church to be a house of God must have an 
altar intended to be a resting place for some 
master representation of the Son of Man ap- 
pealing to the sons of men. Its niches and re- 
cesses must contain idealizations in marble 
or on canvas of the Christ in His various minis- 
trations, or of some saint especially revered 
and worshiped. For the building of this church 
the artist expected no reward. "He was well 
repaid by the delight of seeing his design grow 
from an imagination to a reality, and by spend- 
ing his days in the accepted service of the 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 189 

Lord." 4 So did the architect labor with a 
religious zeal; so too the people in whose com- 
munity the cathedral was building. The work 
would go on from generation to generation ; 
many knew they would never be able to see their 
work completed or worship in the sanctuary. 
But they contributed willingly of their meager 
earnings to the enormous expense of construc- 
tion. For it was the Lord's house and how 
could they appear before Him above if they 
refused to work for Him below! The church 
in that day as never since was indulgent to art 
and never since has art risen to so high a de- 
gree of beauty and devotional value. 

The artist's soul thrills with the thought of 
truth and beauty. He sees what the ordinary 
man feels ; "he enlightens it with his eyes, he 
transfigures it according to his heart, and 
makes it utter what is not in it, — sentiment, 
and that which it neither possesses nor under- 
stands, — thought." Millet painted a cumbrous 
French cart slowly moving along a country 
road. So realistically was the work done that 
men have declared they could hear the wheels 
creak. He painted a man and a woman bow- 
ing their heads at sunset in a field when the 
evening bell, the angelus, called to worship. 
And his work was so soulful that men have de- 

4 Charles Eliot Norton : The Building of Orvieto Ca- 
thedral, from Notes of Travel and Study in Italy. 



190 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

clared they could hear the tolling of the bell. 
One who has seen such a cart on a French road 
and heard the creak of the wheels, or who has 
seen the peasants bow their heads in evening 
worship as the village bell tolled, will hear the 
same noise and the same ringing as he looks at 
those pictures. And it does not take a great 
stretch of the imagination for others to realize 
the same effect. Millet, like all true artists, 
knew how to make his canvas vibrate with life. 
He saw in his creations what he carried in the 
depths of his soul; he gave it form and color 
with the witchery of his genius and sent it forth 
trusting that the deep in his soul would touch 
the depth of other souls. 

Eager striving, tumultuous passion, fever- 
ish emotion, placid serenity, — these the artist, 
with the wand of imagination, calls out to take 
a place on canvas. Grief, love, joy; sadness, 
hate, rapture; — all the delicate, intangible 
shades of feeling, he puts in his pictures. It 
is the spirit, which is made wise by the great 
Spirit, that the painter objectifies. True art 
is not only order and beauty for the eye, but 
also for the soul. This is its essence. The 
painter gives new strength and compass to the 
soul; his work purifies by its mute eloquence. 
Into the infinite he leads the soul of the be- 
holder so that he may be transformed with 
visions of the infinitude of life. 



RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 191 

This is the record of revelation in art. 
While we recognize that at those periods when 
religion showed greatest potentiality and zeal 
art was at its lowest, as in the first age of 
Christianity, the Puritan age and the age of 
the evangelical revival in England; and that 
when art was at its highest, religion flut- 
tered at a very low ebb, as in the time 
of the Renaissance ; still religion has found 
one of its most vital expressions in art and by 
means of its forms has been able to objectify 
spiritual truth for the learned and cultured as 
well as for the lowly and unlettered. Whether 
we see in the painting of a landscape all the 
moods of nature which we feel as we look upon 
the real landscape, but cannot express ; whether 
we look into the face of some man or woman 
or child as it peers out of the canvas and see 
certain depths of soul which we instinctively 
feel as akin to ours ; whether we look upon two 
or more figures grouped in a thousand conceiv- 
able ways and experience the joys and blessings 
of hearty laughter, romping fun, honest labor, 
quiet meditation, soul inspiriting communion ; 
or realize the pangs of grief, the lonesomeness 
of sorrow, the venom of hate and anger ; 
whether we stand in silent contemplation of 
some scene in the life of Jesus or the allegorical 
or symbolical representation of the beauty, the 
love, the truth, which He embodied, we are in 



192 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

the charm as well as in the dynamic force and 
far-reaching effect of the inspiration of the Al- 
mighty. We are better and happier men and 
women because God has thus inspired great 
souls and through them has permitted us to see 
another and corroborative aspect of his reality 
in this world and in the human soul. 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
PROFANE LITERATURE 



XI 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
PROFANE LITERATURE 

"The supreme revelation of literature is the revela- 
tion of those great qualities and characteristics of hu- 
manity which have determined its history, which have 
shaped its experience, which have guided its develop- 
ment, which have persisted through all change of out- 
ward circumstance, and which make up its real being, 
yesterday, to-day, and forever." — William Henry Craw* 
shaw. 

One ought really to apologize for the use of 
the word "profane" in connection with "litera- 
ture." Yet it is a necessary distinction be- 
tween literature in general and the literature 
of the Bible. In music and painting, in sculp- 
ture and architecture, the highest product is 
not something from without but something from 
within. It is the spirit in man which the in- 
spiration of the Almighty giveth understand- 
ing. The same is true of literature. It grows 
out of life and is the interpretation and revela- 
tion of life. " A good book is the precious life- 
blood of a master-spirit," said Milton. It 
195 



196 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

sways human intelligence, stirs human passion, 
influences human action. Every great book is 
a document concerning human life and can never 
be an artificial product. Acute men live. Lit- 
erature is one of the products of such life. 

Music or painting may be debased and ap- 
peal to the lower passions and motives. In 
that proportion it is unworthy and false. This 
is even more true of literature. It affords 
ready opportunity to corrupt and contaminate. 
Literature that is false and base fails in its true 
literary quality in proportion to its baseness 
and falseness. It ceases to be a record of reve- 
lation. A picture, a sonata, a poem, any work 
of art, may be made to impose upon a man, as 
any man may tell falsehoods or betray confi- 
dence. But to that extent he is less a man 
and goes to his own death and oblivion. Life 
proceeds upon the basis of being true at the 
center. Men of all types have consciously, even 
unconsciously, striven to give expression to this 
trueness. A lily is no less fair because it is 
picked from a foul bog, and a truth is no less a 
truth because it sometimes comes from a source 
morally contaminated. But lilies usually come 
from proper surroundings and so does truth. 

The greatest of all man's creative powers is 
the gift of language. With this medium he 
can utter himself clearly and effectively. One 
man speaks what a million have experienced. 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 197 

He does not say: "I shall write a lyric." 
He is stirred by the passions of life and an im- 
mortal song is the result. 1 

We have countless illustrations of the way in 
which this truth has worked itself out in the 
lives of great souls. Take Bunyan, for exam- 
ple, who wrote one of the English classics. 
For years after his Pilgrim's Progress ap- 
peared, its wonderful literary value was not dis- 
covered, and many to-day who would feed on 
the great masterpieces of literature do not 
drink from this well of English undefiled. Not 
only from its literary side, but also from its 
religious and spiritual side, is this book note- 
worthy among the productions of men. For 
in the whole range of religious literature there 
is not found a richer, purer, stronger evangel- 
ical theology than is contained in this marvelous 
allegory. And yet who was Bunyan? A poor 
man who had never been in a school, and in his 
earlier years not an especially good man. 
But he went through a great heart experience, 
his spirit was given understanding by the in- 
spiration of the Almighty, his influence has ex- 
tended far and wide, his name is immortal. He 
had no intention whatever of writing this book, 
and when it was written many advised him not 
to give it publication. 

i On the foregoing paragraphs see W. H. Crawshaw: 
Literary Interpretation of Life, pp. 11-16. 



198 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

It is impossible for us to analyze the proc- 
esses, intellectual or spiritual, by which such a 
writer gets at his truths. They are not based 
on philosophical reasoning or scientific re- 
search. Indeed we find the rules of logic and 
the experiments of the laboratory able to take 
us only so far in our search for truth. Just 
at the point where we would ask our vital ques- 
tions they stop. If we would go further at all 
it is only by the hand of the poet. He leads 
us over the "unplumbed salt estranging sea." 
We are ready to follow because he speaks a 
language our souls understand, we would hear 
his voice, for he calleth his own by name. He 
will go beyond the proofs of what is known, he 
will pass away even from what is real. In the 
unknown he will find all the perfection and 
fruition of the known ; and in the ideal he will 
smooth over and supply the deficiencies of the 
real. "Browning's Pippa is a gentle, noble 
soul, bringing goodness everywhere; in real life 
she would be a poor mill-girl insulted by a 
thousand sordid and accidental details. Shel- 
ley portrays Beatrice Cenci in the transfiguring 
light of poetic truth; actual experience would 
show her tortured by a sinister and ignoble 
fate. No Greek youth could have matched the 
perfect plastic beauty of the Disk-thrower, and 
no Italian woman ever symbolized cruel 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 199 

sphinx-like loveliness as does the Mona Lisa. 
Corot's nature is grayer and softer and more 
harmonious than ever existed on earth. And 
such songs as Schumann's 'Ich Grolle Nicht' 
and Tschaikowsky's 'Nur Wer die Sehnsucht 
Kennt' pulsate with a passion as intense but far 
less torn and fragmentary than that by which 
they were inspired. This serene perfection, 
which wraps like a mantle all works of genuine 
art, ... is attained only by excluding the 
irrelevancies always present in nature." 2 It is 
the escape of prophetic sight and power from 
the very deeps of the soul. It is human but 
so tinged with the divine that we see the God- 
hand and hear the God-voice. 

An illustration of the power of literature to 
move the human will and bring about far-reach- 
ing results for good is found in Harriet Beecher 
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. That the victory 
of the North over the South in the Civil War 
was a real blessing for the South as well as for 
the whole Nation 3 is recognized by far seeing 



2 Daniel Gregory Mason: The Meaning of Music, in 
The Outlook, 26 April, 1902, p. 1005. 

3 E. P. Alexander, Brigadier General in the Confed- 
erate Army, in his Military Memoirs of a Confeder- 
ate, (p. VIII) says: "We now enjoy the rare privilege 
of seeing what we fought for in the retrospect. It no 
longer seems so desirable. It would have proved only a 
curse. We have good cause to thank God for our es- 



200 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

men all over our Country. "Personally" Mrs. 
Stowe "knew very little about slavery except 
by hearsay. Of necessity" her story 
"abounded in inconsistencies, mistakes of fact, 
and impossibilities so far as its social depictions 
were concerned. . . . But the novel made 
a tremendous appeal to the sentiment of hu- 
manity in antagonism to slavery. It argued 
no question, it offered no statistics, it presented 
no thesis. It simply appealed to the sentiments 
of men, and women, and children, for the aboli- 
tion of slavery and its influence was immediate 
and well-nigh limitless." 4 That such a 
book could have so forceful an effect in 
the real abolition of slavery is one of the 
many instances of a spirit in man which 
goes beyond the externalities of form and 
even of fact to realities that are incontroverti- 

cape from it, not alone for our sake, but for that of the 
whole country and even of the world." 

4 George Cary Eggleston: The History of the Con- 
federate War, Vol. I, p. 107, f. This opinion is note- 
worthy as coming from a gentleman who fought on 
the Confederate side. He also meets the criticism "that 
Mrs. Stowe's work was not at all great as a creation in 
fiction but that its immediate and stupendous success 
and influence were due solely to the adventitious cir- 
cumstances of its publication" by calling attention to 
the fact that "those adventitious circumstances did not 
exist in the remote European countries into whose lan- 
guages the novel was presently translated and among 
whose people it continues to be a classic to this day." — 
Ibid, p. 108. 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 201 

ble and convincing. There are no canons of 
literary criticism by which such a work can be 
analyzed. We may take evidence as to its in- 
sufficiency of fact and its crudity of form. 
But the question will remain for decision not 
by a judge on the bench but by a jury in the 
box. And there is never much doubt as to how 
the twelve men, good and true, will decide, 
moved as they always are not by judicial tem- 
perament and strict principles of law, but by 
the convictions of right and justice which the 
commonalty of mankind hold. 

A book of a similar character, although in 
an entirely different field, is Henry Drum- 
mond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World. 
Here the author, taking hold of the great spir- 
itual truth underlying the Darwinian theory of 
evolution, undertook to show not only the simi- 
larity but the identity of law in the natural and 
spiritual realms. Herein was he led to a mis- 
taken conception of law, not only as it obtains 
in the natural or spiritual world, but as it is 
traceable in different parts of the natural 
world. His thesis when first presented to a 
company of scholars was "with one dissenting 
voice" "unanimously condemned." 5 Yet, in 
spite of the inconclusiveness of his logic and the 
mistaken assumption of his analogy, there is 

s From Mr. Drummond's own statement appearing in 
his Life by George Adam Smith, p. 161. 



202 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

power underlying his discussion that made the 
book one of the most potent influences of the 
time for sane religion and an understanding 
between science and theology. He failed to 
harmonize the underlying principles of law in 
the natural and spiritual worlds, but he saw and 
he made others see clearly that there is one 
law, one force, one Being, inherent in and per- 
vading the universe. That this law, this force, 
this Being, is multiform in its activity and ex- 
pression and cannot be pressed into an identity 
of form or procedure which would hold in same- 
ness throughout all realms of nature, mind and 
spirit, — as Drummond seemed to believe, — did 
not detract from the great truth of his essay, 
that God is in His universe and that the world 
of nature and man is one glorious revelation of 
His thought and attitude. 6 

Literature has its heart in the common hu- 
manity of the world and hence is timeless. Its 
message is not restricted to a particular people 
or place. We read a book by a foreign author, 
whether in the original or translation, and are 
stirred by the heart throbs of the people de- 
picted. The unusual setting of the story, oc- 
casioned necessarily by the differences of 
scenery and customs, is of course interesting. 

6 Similar inconsistencies of reasoning also marred Mr. 
Drummond's The Ascent of Man, but the spiritual in- 
sight of this book likewise was compelling. 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 203 

We are pleased to learn of life beyond the seas. 
But our delight in reading the book is not be- 
cause of the new faces and voices and view 
points. These are the incidental necessities of 
place and time. We are moved by the human- 
ness of the characters and the circumstances. 
For we are not reading French or German life 
and conditions. We are realty reading univer- 
sal life without reference to country or age. 
The heroes of Homer are as much alive to 
the reading youth as the heroes of Daniel 
Boone's or Kit Carson's time. In reality mythol- 
ogy is itself a myth. We do not care whether 
Hector or Achilles ever lived ; or for that matter 
whether Homer ever lived. There is far more 
truth than fancy or fun in Kipling's lines : 

"When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, 
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea; 

An' what he thought 'e might require, 
'E went an' took — the same as me ! 

The market-girls an' fishermen, 

The shepherds an' the sailors, too, 

They 'eard old songs turn up again, 
But kep' it quiet — same as you! 

They knew 'e stole ; 'e knew they knowed. 

They didn't tell, nor make a fuss, 
But winked at 'Omer down the road, 

An' 'e winked back — the same as us !" 



204 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

For Homer, or whoever it was, dipped down 
into the full ocean of human life and brought 
his net up teeming with the experiences men 
everywhere and always have made and doubtless 
always will make. The great ballads and lyrics 
of the present and immediate past are full of 
reference to Homer's and Virgil's adventures. 
Achilles sulks in his tent to-day just as much 
as in the dawn of literature, and all the great 
heroes of the past crowd our history in its mak- 
ing. 

As a matter of fact any great masterpiece 
of literature is not the product of any one age 
but is ageless. If Homer had not heard men 
sing by land and sea he could never have sung 
himself. And how far back into the ages the 
songs go which Homer heard we can hardly 
imagine. But all of the great heart experi- 
ences of humanity up to the time Homer sang 
went into his song. We need hardly mention 
a later instance as corroborative. Shakespeare 
is not marked in his significance either by age, 
nationality, or time. Old chronicles, histories, 
tales, dramas, worked over so as hardly to leave 
any evidence of source, or embodied almost 
without change, went into his own marvelous 
productions that fix him forever among the im- 
mortals of literature. It was Shakespeare, a 
single individual at a particular time, writing 
as universal humanity for eternity. His pulse 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 205 

beat because the heart of mankind throbbed. 
Literature was the spontaneous expression of 
his life. However in form and style and con- 
tent he differed from Homer is of little conse- 
quence. Both men live because the blood of a 
common humanity flowed through their veins. 
We do not overlook the fact that all great 
literary geniuses have reflected and represented 
the large factors and influences of the race from 
which they sprang, of the nation to which they 
belonged, and of the age in which they lived. 
What might have resulted had Shakespeare 
lived in Browning's time we do not know. Some 
critics have declared that had Browning lived 
in Shakespeare's day he would have been as 
great a dramatist as the bard of Avon himself. 
Goethe surely could not have written the poetry 
of Tennyson or the essays of Emerson, nor 
could the author of Les Miserables have given 
us the Scarlet Letter. Differences of nation- 
ality and of age, if not also of race, make this 
impossible. But each man in his own country 
and surrounded by racial and temporal influ- 
ences has given us the soul of man as reflected 
in the heart of the universe. 

"Truth is within ourselves: it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may believe; 
There is an inmost centre in us all, 
Where truth abides in fullness." 7 

? Browning: Paracelsus. 



206 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

Into this "inmost center" great souls of all ages 
have penetrated and have found truth in its 
fullness. 

Such men have always walked in the front 
rank of the men of their day, and many of them 
have led the vanguard. As it truly has been 
said that the people will perish where there is 
no vision, so is it true that there has not been 
any long period of civilization's progress where 
there have not been men with a vision. There 
have been periods of sluggish growth but no 
real times of stagnation. False prophets have 
arisen but they have never been able to dis- 
parage the teaching of the true. Men suffer- 
ing from mental or moral astigmatism have 
given us their distorted visions. But whenever 
a Matthew Arnold or a Lord Byron has lived 
a Tennyson and a Browning have been his con- 
temporaries. As railroad and steamship com- 
panies test out the eyesight of their engineers 
and captains, so does each age put its pilots 
to the proof. The optimists have outnumbered 
the pessimists, moods of doubt have been over- 
whelmed by the tides of faith, In Memoriam 
cancels Dover Beach. 

Science, commerce, politics, art, philosophy, 
religion, have all left their record of revelation 
in literature. There is no phase of human ac- 
tivity that language does not express. But it 
is rather to those forms of literature that dis- 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 207 

close more particularly the facts and meaning 
of human nature that we look as interpreting 
life and hence as a record of revelation. 
Whether in novel, essay, poem or drama ; 
whether in history, biography, memoir or let- 
ter, we find ourselves comparing our own ex- 
periences with those of others. We make an- 
alogies and form judgments with no thought of 
error or uncertainty as we read the experiences 
or incidents, the hopes or longings, of others. 
We are influenced to joy and sorrow, or moved 
to laughter and tears, as we enter into the ex- 
periences of human beings, whether in real life 
or fiction. The significance of this influence is 
the fact that some men have been given the gift 
to express what other men feel, and to actual- 
ize what other men live. 

Language has been the readiest record of 
revelation. The great are known to us in their 
method and kind of speech as well as in their 
acts. Grant's whole nature is indicated in 
the phrase : "We shall fight it out on this line 
if it takes all summer." Lincoln's character is 
summed up in his own words : "With malice 
toward none and charity toward all." Each 
of these men in his writings has given us a 
philosophy of history and of life that shall 
bring to all who read them an evidence of God 
in the world and in human life. Not only in 
his Gettysburg Address but in many of his other 



208 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

speeches and in more of his sayings will Abra- 
ham Lincoln continue to be a record of revela- 
tion. The names of great men in other coun- 
tries and times need not be called to witness the 
fact that the Infinite lives and breathes in the 
finite. 

When we hold to the definition of literature 
as the product of men and women who have 
given and give themselves to literary effort we 
have no lack of evidence to show how God has 
moved human beings to witness Him. Not only 
in the content of the literature but in the form 
thereof do we find this fact. God reveals Him- 
self in nature according to order, adaptation 
and beauty. These too we find in literature. 
We are not less impressed by the order and 
beauty in literary products than we are in na- 
ture. And we find adaptation everywhere in 
evidence. The various forms in literary expres- 
sion lend themselves to exhibit all phases of har- 
mony, order and beauty. 

We sometimes wonder which makes the 
stronger appeal, the captivating form in which 
a poem is written or the thought it is intended 
to express. To be sure the inspiration which 
prompts the thought will also produce the 
power fitly to express it. The poet is gifted 
both as to thought and versification. The two 
really are one, else he would not be a poet. We 
are speaking, of course, of real poetry and not 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 209 

mere rhyming. When Wordsworth writes, for 
example, 

"My heart leaps up when I behold 

A Rainbow in the sky : 
So was it when my life began; 
So is it now I am a man; 
So be it when I shall grow old, 

Or let me die!" 

the beauty of the lines is as pleasing as the 
thought is compelling. The verse calls up not 
only the actual scene of the rainbow but also 
the experience of witnessing its glory. This is 
only an example picked out at random from the 
many similar effective touches in Wordsworth 
and from only one poet out of scores who might 
be quoted. The personality of each poet enters 
into his poems, and we have souls as unlike as 
Kipling, Walt Whitman and Browning express- 
ing our experiences in their own particular 
way. Their form is as different each from that 
of the other as they themselves are in disposi- 
tion. 

Of course certain poems, both because of 
thought and form, will appeal to some persons 
and not to others. The personality of the 
reader needs to be taken into account as much 
as the personality of the writer. But he who 
has no appreciative sense of poetry is cut off 
from a most essential source of soul power. 



210 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

The world of men can never become so material 
and so practical as to make appeal and to give 
power only to the practical and materially 
minded man. In fact we can really live in spite 
of the material and practical tendencies of civ- 
ilization because of the spiritualizing influences 
which issue from souls keyed to the music and 
ideality of the universe. The poet enhances 
life's values. This he is able to do because in 
him is a deposit of God's truth which he shapes 
and fashions for the pleasure and inspiration 
of his fellow-men. He could not be true to 
himself did he not give expression to the eternal 
in him. Even were there none to read he 
would still be constrained to write. 

The same is true in kind if not in degree of 
the essayist and moralizer. There is a distinct 
difference between the style of Emerson and 
that of Carlyle, but it is the difference which 
existed in the men themselves. Both have a 
message for their fellows and both must give it 
expression. The ruggedness of the one's 
thought as well as the even tenor of the other's 
is evident in the style of each. Neither could 
speak like the other because neither could live 
like the other. But both had a revelation for 
humankind of which their respective writing is 
a record. Both appeal to one's sense of beauty 
in their style, although the beauty in Carlyle's 
work is that of the Scotch mountain and lake 



IN PROFANE LITERATURE 211 

while Emerson's is that of the more quiet New 
England scenery. Both enlarge one's thought, 
although Carlyle's greatening is more the ad- 
ding from without while Emerson's is the 
growth from within. Both quicken and deepen 
the emotional nature, although Carlyle's effect 
is rather that of a rushing mountain stream 
while Emerson gives a hint of the tides which 
are underneath and cannot be seen. Both en- 
noble and refine the spirit, although Carlyle's 
tendency is that of the workman using heavy 
tools to bring out the form and semblance, 
while Emerson suggests the artist putting on 
the delicate but strong finishing touches. 

It has been said that the essayist writes be- 
cause of an impulse to frame words in pleasing 
sentences and paragraphs rather than from a 
conviction that he has a message which must be 
delivered. This judgment is too superficial to 
receive much notice. It depreciates the sincerity 
of men and women who have left a real impress 
upon the world through their writings. Art 
for art's sake, when rightly interpreted, means 
life for life's sake. The essayist who really 
lives gives life. In so doing he also adds to 
the artistic content of literature. He becomes 
a moralizer in spite of himself. Even when he 
disavows preachment he nevertheless preaches. 
When Coleridge said to Lamb, "Have you ever 
heard me preach?" Lamb replied, "I have 



212 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

never heard you do anything else." The es- 
sayist is a moralizer, Gilbert K> Chesterton as 
well as Arthur Christopher Benson, H. G. Wells 
as well as Samuel McChord Crothers; he is a 
moralizer because he is living deeper in the pres- 
ent and farther in the future than most of his 
contemporaries and is hearing the bell of eter- 
nity ring. He would be the last to declare he 
is the medium of God's revelation. Doubtless 
he would disavow this claim did he hear it made 
for him. He writes not as playing a part but 
as being himself. And, being himself, he makes 
for the whole. Other men see the universal in 
him and feel the breath of the farther shore. 
His art eventuates in life and his life makes for 
art. 

To cultivate the sense of beauty, to en- 
large the thought, to quicken and deepen the 
emotional nature, and to ennoble and refine the 
spirit — this is the effect of all real literature, 
whatever its form may be. Herein lies the se- 
cret of the influence the writings of man have 
had in the ongoing of time. Every true piece 
of writing, both as to thought and expression, 
is a work of art. The artist is given the power 
to discover what is in the heart of man and to 
tell of his discovery so effectively that men will 
see and know his words are truth. Revelation 
to him will be the truth in him and its record 
the literature through which he gives it expres- 
sion. 



THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
HOLY WRIT 



XII 

THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN 
HOLY WRIT 

"We search the world for truth; we cull 
The good, the pure, the beautiful, 
From graven stone and written scroll, 
From all old flower fields of the soul; 
And, weary seekers of the best, 
We come back laden from our quest, 
To find that all the sages said 
Is in the book our mothers read." 

— John Greenleaf Whittier. 

As all roads in the beginning of the Chris- 
tian era led to Rome, so all roads in the realm 
of Christian civilization lead to the Bible. 
They may have their origin in the remotest end 
of the intellectual or spiritual kingdom, they 
may lead over deserts or quagmires as well as 
through flower bordered fields, they may come 
down through the valleys or up over the 
heights : but whence or in what way, finally 
they come to the Bible. 

Rome in her strongest day never had a power 
over her subjects like unto that which the Bible 
holds over the thought and life of men. Rome's 
215 



216 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

strength was only relative: a mightier oppo- 
nent might at any time arise ; it was only tem- 
porary: the ills that all men are heir to sooner 
or later would gnaw at her vitals and she must 
sink down and disappear. The strength of the 
Bible, on the other hand, has never been threat- 
ened by the greater power of a rival in the field 
of religious literature: it has held its own on 
comparison with, and shown itself to be superior 
to all other bibles in the field of comparative reli- 
gion ; its strength has never been sub j ect to de- 
cay: by an organic force it renews its vitality 
continually and always has the dew of youth 
upon it, strong as a young man to run a race 
and conquer. No book has held the attention 
of mankind for anything, even approximately, 
like the time the Bible has. All nations have 
found in it their light and life, and all peoples 
have discovered it to be as well fitted to their 
own conditions and needs as if it had been writ- 
ten for them in particular and not for the 
whole world in general. 

Here is one of the great facts of history and 
of life; a fact as stupendous as it is stubborn. 
Man can no more ignore it than the mariner 
can ignore the Rock of Gibraltar. To some 
men the Bible may mean nothing more than a 
mere name or vague idea, as the Rock of Gib- 
raltar may be a fact of which they have merely 
heard but of which they know nothing definite. 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 217 

But despite this ignorance or indifference the 
Bible stands guarding the entrance to life as 
Gibraltar does the Mediterranean. And he who 
finds his way to the study of the Bible is as 
mightily impressed by its unspeakable strength 
as the traveler when he first comes in sight of 
England's stronghold. 

In former times, and to some extent even yet, 
it has been held a sacrilege to put the Bible 
to the same tests as are applied to other an- 
cient documents. But there is nothing to 
fear from careful and consistent criticism. We 
demand only that the investigator be fair as 
well as capable, and that he do not allow his 
conclusions to be more rapidly made than the 
facts will allow. Like any other history of a 
people the Old Testament is composed of docu- 
ments written at widely separated periods of 
time and place, and reflecting views of men 
who were the children of their day, largely lim- 
ited and controlled by prevailing custom and 
circumstance. Hence the different sources of 
the Old Testament are not of equal value. 
Legend and folk-lore, anecdote, parable, riddle, 
poetry, apocalypse, are found side by side, or 
intermixed with chronicles, old laws, genealo- 
gies, biographies, history and prophecy, 1 the 

1 On this subject an interesting statement is made 
by a well known Catholic scholar. The Bible, he says, 
"contains old history, handled with freedom, legends, 



218 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

whole being set forth to show the providential 
leading of a people by Almighty God. 

Written history among the Hebrews began 
about the year 900 b. c. with the oldest history 
of David. But long before this time traditions 
and legends, poems and anecdotes, were current 
among the Israelites, as among all early peo- 
ples before the day of written history. As long 
as the Israelites were leading a nomadic life 
there was no occasion for writing down their 
sajangs and stories as these were sung and told 
from mouth to mouth and at the camp fire un- 
til they became well known even to the children. 
But when they settled in fixed abodes, and es- 
pecially in times of peace, little by little a de- 
sire grew to preserve their sayings and stories 
and traditions in permanent form. The era of 
writing began. Many ancient remains of writ- 
ten literature are scattered through the books 
of the Old Testament. We find them repro- 
duced in exact citation and also adapted in 
song and legend. 

The same is true of the New Testament. 

and folk-lore, chronicles quoted and abridged, genealo- 
gies of people and settlements of races according to 
current views, anecdotes illustrating the qualities of 
heroic men, laws in every stage of growth and decay, 
proverbs, parables, apocalypses, dreams, speeches. It 
offers us biography viewed under a religious light, apo- 
logues and meditative prayers, riddles, etc." William 
Barry: Tradition of Scripture, p. 236. 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 219 

Here we find divergent accounts in the first 
three Gospels and contradictions which need to 
be harmonized. This is an undertaking which 
found favor even in the most conservative cir- 
cles, for what preacher of a former generation 
was without his "Harmony" of the Gospels? 
And all of those who wrote concerning Jesus 
were not eyewitnesses, nor were their means of 
knowing about Him all of the same kind. 

Long after Jesus' death, when there was dan- 
ger of losing the exactness of His utterances, 
those who stood nearest to Him or who had been 
most strongly influenced by Him, undertook to 
give an accurate account of His life and teach- 
ing. Luke, in the preface to his Gospel, tells 
us with much particularity how painstakingly 
he gathered the information for his life of 
Jesus, how he sifted and weighed and arranged 
the material which came to his hand. In the 
strict meaning of the term he was the first 
higher critic, for he used the true scientific 
method in gathering and collating his sources 
and drawing reasonable inferences from them. 

In studying the Bible, therefore, it is well to 
remember that we are using old manuscripts 
which have come down to us from various 
sources and through a multiplicity of hands 
during a long period of years. Careful investi- 
gation and reverent discrimination are neces- 
sary. Some things will always be difficult to 



220 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

understand. Others we shall never get in their 
true meaning, owing to the mutilated form 
in which the manuscripts were handed to poster- 
ity. In spite of all the difficulties, 2 however, 
the Bible stands supreme as the book of reli- 
gion and gives us a content we find nowhere 
else. 

The Old Testament goes to the heart of every 
problem mankind in any age has had to solve. 
His hopes and longings and fears are all ex- 
pressed in imperishable words and his cry for 
deliverance from himself and the world can never 
be subdued. In the New Testament "the gospel 
goes straight to the heart of things, concerns 

2 George Bancroft when a student at Berlin wrote to 
Professor Andrews Norton on February 15, 1821, as fol- 
lows: "A few weeks ago, animated by the encouraging 
assistance of Baron Humboldt, I ventured the 'Aga>- 
memnon' of iEschylus. What a world of difficulties 
start up on every page ! How uncertain the readings ! 
How doubtful the interpretations ! Many a place re- 
fuses to admit of an explanation unless boldly amended 
by conjectural criticism. And yet when the obstacles 
are all fairly encountered, and as far as our weak 
powers extend, overcome, what greater delight can a 
man feel than that of reading 'Agamemnon'? It is the 
sublimest work of Grecian tragedy," etc. (Reprinted 
in The Transcript, Boston, June 26, 1906.) The same 
can be said of the study of the Bible in the original 
manuscripts, especially those of the Old Testament. 
And how much truer is it of the Bible to say that 
"when the obstacles are all fairly encountered" "what 
greater delight can a man feel than that of reading" the 
Sacred Scriptures ! 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 221 

itself directly with the highest moral and relig- 
ious efforts of human life, tells us on what every- 
thing ultimately depends, and in its transcen- 
dental idealism overleaps almost all the means 
and conditions by which, and under which, the 
higher life of man works and develops." 3 

Much as man would get from under author- 
ity and be absolutely free, he nevertheless looks 
for authority and would have a final authorita- 
tive word giving him his direction. Even those 
who consider themselves free to put the Bible 
to the most strenuous tests ; to criticize it at 
will; to compare it with other religious or phil- 
osophical literature ; nevertheless exhibit, in one 
way or another, their desire to find the final 
word of authority. In fact, the very reason 
why the Bible from the beginning has gone 
through such severe ordeals is because men have 
considered that it is, or ought to be, authorita- 
tive, and their criticism really has been the best 
evidence of the universal desire on the part of 
man to find an authoritative guide in life. 

There are those who insist upon the Bible, as 
it stands, as being such an absolute authority. 
If the Bible is not such a book, they can not 
find in it any guide or consolation whatever. 
The whole teaching power of the Bible depends 
upon its authoritativeness. As to just how we 

3Wilhelm Bousset: The Faith of a Modern Protes- 
tant, Eng. tr., p. 82. 



REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

would define this word "authority," and what 
kind of a control it should have over men, there 
is no unanimity of opinion. In fact, those who 
declare most strenuously for the authority of 
the Bible have more or less vague notions of 
what the authority should be. 

The whole question of the authority of the 
Bible is wrapped up in the questions of revela- 
tion and inspiration. We could hardly claim 
that the Bible carried with it an especial au- 
thority if we did not find in it a revelation of 
God. Furthermore, if this revelation had not 
been received through the medium of inspired 
men it surely could not carry with it the weight 
of authority necessary to make the Bible a real 
guide in life. As we found that God's revela- 
tion is not confined to the Bible, nor that only 
the men who transmitted this revelation were 
inspired, so do we find that the Bible does not 
contain the only or all of the guidance that man 
has or should have in life. We should say, how- 
ever, that as the supreme revelation of God is 
found in the Bible and the fullest degree of in- 
spiration, so also is the authority of the Bible 
superior to and comprehensive of all other au- 
thority. 

Take, for example, the Ten Commandments. 
Criticism has centered around these Command- 
ments perhaps more so than around any other 
part of the Old Testament. Scholars have de- 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 

clared that the Ten Commandments, in the form 
in which we have them, were not the original 
Commandments and that their authorship is ex- 
ceedingly doubtful. But this code remains, in 
spite of criticism, as an authority in all mat- 
ters which pertain to the conduct of men and 
of nations. 

The human race probably will never come to 
a time when the Ten Commandments will be 
looked upon as obsolete or as having, lost their 
bearing upon the practical matters of human 
kind. 4 What the critics say is interesting and 
important, but they are not able to take from 
us the Ten Commandments as they have been 
alive in the world for century upon century and 
as they fit into the life of the human race to-day 
even as they met the conditions of men a thou- 
sand years before Christ was born. There is 
an authoritative note in their utterance which 
compels the attention of man. Although he 
may not be willing to submit himself to them, 
yet he cannot reason away their significance 
and applicability in the affairs of his daily life. 
Thou shalt have no other God beside Me. Thou 

* "In vain we call old notions fudge ' 

And bend our conscience to our dealing; 
The Ten Commandments will not budge 
And stealing will continue stealing." 

Motto of the "American Copyright League," written 
by James Russell Lowell. 



REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

shalt honor thy father and thy mother. Thou 
shalt not desecrate the Holy Sabbath. Thou 
shalt not commit murder. Thou shalt not steal. 
Thou shalt not bear false testimony. These 
sound with a note so strong that it is heard 
above all the din and confusion of a work-a-day 
world. 

Man cannot get away from these Command- 
ments. If we look at them carefully we will 
discover that even although they mention par- 
ticular things which man is not to do, they 
do not enter into details. They are general in 
content. They have relationship, not to a par- 
ticular time or a particular people, Palestine, 
for example, and the children of Israel, but 
are universal in their scope and have reference 
to all times and to all peoples. 

Furthermore, they are not philosophical in 
content, but are ethical. They are not some- 
thing that only the learned can grasp, but 
something that the child on his way to kinder- 
garten can understand. Yet each one of the 
Commandments has so ample a scope that in it 
all of the wider bearings of conduct can be dis- 
covered. "Thou shalt have no other God be- 
side Me." There is no argument here as to the 
being or nature of God. The statement as- 
sumes not only that God is, but that He is ab- 
solute, and that no other worship on the part 
of man can have any effect or validity. Under 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 225 

this general commandment the whole scheme of 
the philosophy of religion and morality of con- 
duct is embodied. "Thou shalt honor thy 
father and thy mother." There is no argu- 
ment here as to filial duty, no question raised 
as to the relationship between parents and child. 
Yet the whole concern of the family, of the do- 
mestic life, of the security of the home, is in- 
volved in this one commandment. So with all 
the other commandments. They refer to a par- 
ticular thing. But when we consider that there 
are only ten commandments, and hence a lim- 
ited number of particular things designated, 
we must search for the secret of their power 
and the cause of their continued life in the 
element which gives them universal relevancy. 
So we might look at the great prophets, 
Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah. Each one thun- 
dered against evil at a particular time. One 
might declare that their words have reference 
only to an epoch in history, just as each presi- 
dential campaign in our own country seems to 
center about some one question. But when we 
hear Amos beginning those awful denunciations 
against the nations surrounding Israel and Ju- 
dah, and coming by gradual stages in his ap- 
plication to Judah and then to Israel, we hear 
the echo in our own land, in our own immediate 
vicinity. The words of Amos, although they 
have to do with evils and kinds of persecution 



226 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

of which we know nothing to-day, nevertheless 
strike home with convicting power. We can 
think of the same kind of oppression and cor- 
ruption and malfeasance and infidelity and greed 
and lust and wickedness immediately about us 
and of which, in some way or other, we are a 
part. Amos' words are authoritative. They 
strike every land, every age, every individual. 
Even although in detail they do not apply par- 
ticularly to us, in their broad and far-reaching 
sweep they take us into consideration and fill us 
with the same kind of dread and remorse which 
were awakened in the people of Judah and of 
Israel. 

So the great sermons of Isaiah which he 
preached to his fellow citizens ring in our ears, 
apply to our conditions, convict us of our 
guilt, condemn us for our misdoings. We 
are unable to escape their application. 
Although we know nothing about burnt 
offerings, or vegetable offerings, or peace 
offerings, or any of the other rites which Isaiah 
declared to be an abomination, yet when he 
says : "Your new moons and your appointed 
feasts, my soul hateth. They are a trouble 
unto me. I am weary to bear them, and when 
ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes 
from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I 
will not hear ; your hands are full of blood," we 
understand that he has been talking to every 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT W 

nation and of every people which has lived since 
his day. We find in his particular teachings 
the universal element of God's authoritative ut- 
terance. He, too, is not a philosopher nor a 
metaphysician. He does not make investiga- 
tions or give definitions after the manner of the 
scientist. But he is the preacher — the man 
who is in close touch with humanity; the man 
who is living near to the Almighty, and who be- 
comes a prophet because, knowing the nature of 
God and seeing the wayward conduct of man, he 
can foretell what must be the conduct of God 
and the end of His disobedient children. 

Furthermore, in the Old Testament, there is 
always the expression of an unfulfilled longing. 
Man realizes his insufficiency. He knows that 
his tendencies are toward evil; that his will to 
controvert his tendencies is weak and that he is 
forever in the grasp of powers that draw him 
down. Yet in spite of this he tries to reach 
upward. He has a yearning to scale the heights 
of good behavior. The greatest need of his 
soul is to come in contact with the ideal. We 
find everywhere that he has made this ideal per- 
sonal. He looks forward to the ideal Deliverer, 
the ideal Friend, the ideal Saviour. He turns 
to the future and looks for one to come who 
in himself will contain every element that will 
make for perfect truth and perfect conduct in 
man. There is an authoritative note even in 



REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

the longing of the Hebrews. It appeals to us 
as Job cries : "Oh that there were a man who 
could speak to God and intercede for man." 

This longing for a mediator between man 
and God is so irrepressible in the Old Testa- 
ment that it is well to consider it in the light of 
the revelation the Bible brings. 

The idea of mediation between God and man 
is common to all religions. In the lowest grade 
of civilization and among savage people the 
idea of a mediator, of one who pleads for a man 
with God or the unseen powers, finds its expres- 
sion and incarnation in such forms as the medi- 
cine man, the sorcerer, the rainmaker, whose 
functions are to appease the offended and angry 
gods of nature. These men were thought to 
be gifted with occult powers and hence were re- 
garded with veneration and awe. They were 
supposed to penetrate into the unseen world, to 
read the future and influence the supernatural 
powers. They sought to accomplish this by the 
use of charms and spells, ghosts and totems. 
They professed to mediate between the living 
and the dead, between the lost and the seeking, 
between the weakness of the finite and the pow- 
ers of the Infinite. Even the savage felt his 
need of a close union with the gods and by such 
means did he try to appease them and find their 
favor. His cry : "Oh, that one would plead for 
a man with the gods," becomes truly pathetic. 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 229 

In the higher forms of religion the idea of 
mediation takes on a loftier phase. The priest 
becomes the mediator between man and God. 
He pleads with God by means of animal sacri- 
fice and the offering of first fruits. Among the 
Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, 
the Hindus and the Buddhists, the priests en- 
joy high rank and are venerated by the com- 
mon people to a great degree. They busy them- 
selves in perfecting most elaborate and richly 
adorned rituals. They have no potency, how- 
ever, and are unable to help their devotees. The 
priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, we are told, 
prayed and cried aloud all day to their gods for 
help, doing themselves bodily harm, to attract 
their attention. But it was all in vain. So even 
to-day the ruins of vaulted temples and arched 
tombs, built where the Nile, the Euphrates, the 
Mediterranean Sea, almost washed their outer 
courts, re-echo with the cry: "Oh that one 
might plead for a man with God." 

In the Hebrew religion the idea of media- 
tion is fundamental. Surrounded as they were 
by pagan nations, the Hebrews borrowed from 
them many of their early religious ideas. But 
the mind of the Hebrew was as a furnace purg- 
ing and purifying all pagan ideas which came to 
it. So we find the idea of mediation among 
the Hebrews distinctly their own. In the be- 
ginning the head of every household was a 



230 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

priest or mediator, making sacrifices for his 
family and entering into covenant relations for 
them with God. We read of Abraham and 
Isaac and Jacob performing these functions. 
A typical example of a mediator in the Old 
Testament is the patriarch Abraham plead- 
ing with God for the city of Sodom in which 
Lot, a member of his family, had taken refuge. 
He stands with all humility, but with praise- 
worthy insistence, begging of the Almighty that 
He spare the city if fifty righteous are 
found therein. And when the request is 
granted he asks that the city be spared if only 
forty-five righteous are found therein, and then 
forty, thirty, twenty, until, throwing himself 
upon the mercy of Jehovah, saying he is mere 
dust and ashes, and begging the Lord not to 
become angry with him, he pleads for the city 
if only ten righteous are found therein. 

At a later period we find Moses appearing 
as a mediator for his people. Time and again 
he goes to Pharaoh to plead for them until 
Pharaoh gives permission for them to depart. 
Then out in the wilderness it is he who mediates 
between them and God, bringing to them the 
laws on the tablets of stone, beseeching God in 
their behalf when they fall into the error of 
making the molten calf, even going so far as 
to express himself as willing that his own name 
be blotted out of God's book if God will but for- 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 231 

give the people their sins. Twelve centuries 
before Christ we find a mediator willing to sac- 
rifice himself for the sins of his people! 

In the priesthood the idea of purity enters in 
to an important degree. A man must be cere- 
monially pure in order to stand before God for 
his fellow men. He must be without bodily 
blemish. None other could approach the altar 
of God and sacrifice thereon for the benefit of 
the people. The priesthood became a caste, 
only the priests could enter the sacred 
precincts of the temple, and only the high 
priest the holy of holies. The priest bears 
the sins and iniquity of the people and, 
in surrendering himself to God, makes 
atonement for them. Their sacrifices and offer- 
ings also must be pure and without blemish. 
But we do not need to read at length in the Old 
Testament to learn that the priests became cor- 
rupt, and disgraced rather than hallowed their 
office. The people were left without a media- 
tor, one in whom they could trust. So the 
cry issued from the lips of many a burdened 
soul : "Oh that one might plead for a man with 
God." 

Side by side with the priesthood grew the 
prophets who afterwards took upon themselves 
the duty of denouncing the corruption of the 
priests and the profanation of the temple. A 
prophet, too, must be without guile, a man of 



232 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

clean lips, a real servant of the Lord, who could 
speak for God to the people. So we have such 
mighty men as Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah 
who stemmed the tide of iniquity, and raised 
their voices above the storm to declare the jus- 
tice, purity and love of God. They cry : "Thus 
saith the Lord," and rebuke without reserve the 
unrighteousness of the high and mighty. They 
intercede for the people, plead for them with 
God, as Jeremiah prayed for .Jerusalem and 
Ezekiel for the Nation. And the loftiest ideal 
of the prophet is to suffer for the sins of his 
people. He becomes the real servant of the 
Lord, despised and rejected of men, a man of 
sorrows and acquainted with grief. There were 
only a few great names among the prophets. 
The many were false to their calling, they were 
ready to prophesy for money or position, to 
flatter the people, to become mere tricksters, 
who cried: "Peace, peace, when there was no 
peace." So the longing of many a heart con- 
tinued to express itself in the words of Job : 
"Oh that one might plead for a man with God." 
The idea of mediation, as we see, is a funda- 
mental element in religion. Man has always 
recognized his estrangement from God and 
longed for union with Him. He has always 
had a sense of incompleteness and insufficiency, 
and an impulse to find a being who could speak 
with final and absolute authority. The media- 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 

tion of patriarch, priest and prophet was a con- 
secrated hope for deliverance. But patriarchs 
and prophets and priests came and went. Some 
were holy and undefiled, others were corrupt and 
blemished. There must be one acceptable in all 
respects who could plead for a man with God; 
one who would stand as the representative of 
the race for all time. Men might accept or 
reject him, but there he would stand and con- 
tinue to stand as the perfect medium between a 
loving God and a sinning people. The later 
Jews themselves realized that all other media- 
tion had failed. They believed that God must 
send a Messiah who would execute the divine 
will and realize the blessings of divine grace for 
Israel. He was to be invested with superhuman 
powers, he was to be sinless himself, and hence 
could purify as well as liberate Israel. The 
New Testament writers declared that these ideas 
became incarnated in Jesus Christ. In the full- 
ness of time, we read, God sent forth His only 
Son as the Redeemer of the race. 

Christianity, above all religions, therefore, 
emphasizes clearly and forcibly the real need of 
mediation between man and God. This is the 
one theme of the New Testament and Job's cry : 
"Oh that one would plead for a man with God," 
is there satisfied. The disciples give us strong 
proof of the mediatorial office of Jesus Christ. 
They did not fully understand Him until after 



234 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

His death and resurrection had made many of 
His sayings plain. Peter becomes their spokes- 
man in that eloquent defense of his Master as 
recorded in the second and third chapters of the 
Acts of the Apostles. Paul, familiar as he was 
with the Hebrew religion and its idea of media- 
tion, recognized at once in Jesus the perfect 
mediator. He reveals to man God's love and 
brings divine grace to him. "For we are jus- 
tified freely by His grace through the redemp- 
tion that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath sent 
forth to be a propitiation through faith in His 
blood. For God commended His love toward us 
in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for 
us." Through Jesus also He communicates to 
us His knowledge, for "He who commanded the 
light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our 
hearts to give the light of the knowledge of 
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 
For God was in Christ reconciling the world 
unto Himself. For He hath made Christ to be 
sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be 
made the righteousness of God in Him." 

Especially does the writer of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews dwell upon the mediatorial work 
of Jesus Christ. He was genuinely a man, hav- 
ing assumed human flesh and blood and was 
made like unto his brethren. He acknowledged 
a common dependence with them upon God and 
confessed Himself their brother. He grew, in 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 235 

consequence of His earthly experience, both in 
stature and knowledge, He was obedient, indus- 
trious, pious, and faithful. He had a supreme 
faith in God and prayed to Him incessantly. 
Through the discipline of temptation and suffer- 
ing He was perfected for his mediatorial work. 
This development at every stage was sinless. 
The innocency of His childhood was tested and 
strengthened by hard struggle and His sinless- 
ness was the result of a constantly increasing 
realization of the good. So does the writer to 
the Hebrews describe Jesus as the perfect Me- 
diator who has passed through the heavens to 
the immediate presence of God, who is per- 
fected forevermore, the same to-day, yesterday 
and forever, who ever liveth to make intercession 
for us. 

Thus, also, we find Jesus speaking for Him- 
self. "Which of you convicteth Me of sin?" is 
His challenge. In the pure light of His spot- 
less character all defilement shrivels up or slinks 
away. Because He was sinless, separate, and 
apart from all men in this vital respect, did He 
have a right to plead for man with God. He 
came to give His life a ransom for many, and 
this was a voluntary surrender. He claimed 
a divine sonship and union with God; He was a 
dispenser of the bread and water of life; the 
light of the world, the true vine, the good shep- 
herd. He was the door of the sheepfold, the 



236 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

only way to the Father. To see Him was to 
see the Father. He exemplifies the idea of per- 
fect mediation in His teaching. His original- 
ity, His lofty tone, His spiritual power, His 
self-evident truthfulness, proclaim His divine 
origin and show Him to be the speaker through 
which the will of God on earth is realized. In 
the mighty works which He did He exhibits 
divine power over the ills and frailties of man. 
In His prayers He carries on His work of media- 
tion as is especially shown in the seventeenth 
chapter of the Gospel of John. In His death 
He substantiates His claim as the perfect media- 
tor. He dies for no personal object of His 
own, but wholly on behalf of His people. He is 
a perfect sacrifice for them. 

Jesus exhibited in Himself the necessary asso- 
ciation with the Almighty which made Him the 
particular recipient of the will of the eternal 
and fitted Him to make a strong and sufficient 
appeal to man. Although there are those who 
cannot declare Jesus to be the realization of 
the Jewish hope, that He is the Messiah, the 
Saviour of the world, men cannot rid themselves 
of Him. As Emerson has said: the name of 
Jesus "is not so much written as plowed into 
the history of this world." 5 Thoughtful men 
must account for His peculiar power and per- 
sistency in the world, the indwelling of His spirit 

5 Works, Vol. I, p. 126. 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 237 

in the men of to-day, the saving fullness of His 
life which means life in abundance for every 
human soul. No great philosopher, no com- 
manding genius in the thought world, has found 
himself able to escape this authoritative power 
of % Jesus. The greatest minds of the ages since 
Jesus came into the world have considered it 
extremely important to account for Him and to 
fit Him into their systems. Even the criticism, 
whether moderate or extreme, which has been 
directed against the Christ has had for its final 
result the deepening of the conviction that man 
cannot walk along the highway of life without 
encountering Jesus. Although He may be 
snubbed on the road or ruthlessly forced off it, 
He regains the right-of-way. 

Jesus in Himself is an authority which the 
intellect must recognize. While we would ad- 
mit the contention that the details of Jesus' life 
do not fit into the life of to-day, practically 
speaking, yet we cannot overlook the aptness of 
His message for to-day. His teaching is so 
far reaching that it comes to us with full po- 
tency of authority. In His teaching He does 
not ally Himself with the schools. He is not 
a philsospher nor a metaphysician. He allies 
Himself with the people. He knows the needs 
of the human soul. He is a moralist in the 
direct sense of that term and spiritualizes every- 
thing He touches. This is the secret of His 



238 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

mighty power and the reason why His author- 
ity is immediate and universal in nature. His 
appeal to men has always been irresistible. A 
remarkable proof of this fact is the quick re- 
sponse of men and women who hear of Him for 
the first time. Missionary history is full of ex- 
amples. Especially has His influence over the 
thinking men of the Orient been fascinating. 
The imaginary heathen of the first century 
expresses the conviction of many an Eastern 
soul to-day: 

"If Jesus Christ is a man, — 

And only a man, — I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to him, 

And to him will I cleave alway. 

If Jesus Christ is a God, — 

And the only God, — I swear 
I shall follow him through' heaven and hell, 

The earth, the sea, and the air !" 6 

As Jesus was in the days of the flesh, so 
countless people to-day regard Him. To them 
He is the vital union between man and God, 
living in glory as the undying, unfailing, un- 
forgetting, friend and Saviour of man ; still rep- 
resenting God to man and man to God, so that 
in Him man may be at peace and at rest with 

e Richard Watson Gilder: The Song of a Heathen (So- 
journing in Galilee, AD. 32). Complete Poems, p. 53. 



THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 239 

God. The figure of an interceding priest in 
heaven has ever been profoundly impressive and 
helpful to Christians of all ages. The cry of 
Job is still uttered: "Oh that one might plead 
for a man with God." But the hungry, longing 
soul turns to Christ and finds in Him the one 
for whom Job's burdened soul yearned. 

In the Sistine Madonna a curtain is thrown 
back on both sides in the foreground. The 
Madonna and the Christ Child emerge from 
the clouds with a host of angels in their train. 
On one side in front of the curtain Saint Bar- 
bara is kneeling in adoration and looks down 
and out of the picture, while on the other side 
Saint Sixtus, looking up at the Virgin, points 
in the direction in which Saint Barbara is 
looking. Originally this painting formed the 
altar piece of a humble church in one of the 
smaller towns of Italy. The curtain in the 
picture was joined by the actual curtains of 
the altar. As one came into the church the 
figures in the picture looked real. At the altar 
men and women, burdened by sin and sorrow 
and grief, were kneeling. There is no earthly 
help for them. Out of the picture Saint Bar- 
bara looks down upon them with unutterable 
compassion. But Saint Sixtus turns to the 
Christ and pointing to the bowed forms be- 
seeches aid for them. "I can do nothing," he 
seems to be saying, "Thou alone canst help." 



240 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD 

This master painting represents the supreme 
record of revelation in the Bible. "If any man 
sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus 
Christ the righteous ; and He is the propitiation 
for our sins, and not for ours only, but also 
for the sins of the whole world." 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbot, "Through Na- 
ture to Christ," 112. 

Abraham, 109. 

Acts of the Apostles, 
(17:32), 41; second 
and third chapters, 
234. 

Adams, George Burton, 
"Civilization during 
the Middle Ages," 
162. 

Agamemnon, The, 220. 

Agassiz, "Premedita- 
tion of God," 53. 

Aked, Charles F., "The 
Courage of the Cow- 
ard," 121. 

Alexander, E. R., "Mil- 
itary Memoirs of a 
Confederate," 199 f. 

Allegorical Method of 
Interpretation, 93 f. 

Amos, 135, 225 f. 

Anthropomorphism, 22, 
23. 

Appearance and reality, 
53. 

Archimedes, 61. 

24,3 



Argonaut, The, 110. 

Arnold, Matthew, criti- 
cism of his "Eternal 
not Ourselves," 111; 
his "Creed of Illu- 
sion," 138 f; opinion 
of "When I survey 
the wondrous cross," 
140 f; "Dover 
Beach," 138 f, 161, 
206. 

Art, in relation to sci- 
ence, 45 f; Egypt, 
Babylonia, 52; inspi- 
ration of, 80. 

Art critics, 68. 

Authority, final, 221 f. 

Bach, 44. 

Ballard, Frank, "Mir- 
acles of Unbelief," 
114. 

Bancroft, George, on 
translating Agamem- 
non, 220. 

Barry, William, "Tradi- 
tion of Scripture," 
217 f. 



244 



INDEX 



Beethoven, 44. 

Belief, life without im- 
possible, 8; all great 
ages ages of sincere 
belief, 10. 

Benson, A. C, "Alfred 
Tennfyson," 136; a 
moralizer, 212. 

Bible, as record of 
revelation, 69 ; typo- 
graphical errors in, 
75 f ; revision of, 76; 
errors of translation, 
76 ; Old Testament 
quotations in New, 77 
f; great fact of his- 
tory, 216; how to be 
studied, 219; author- 
ity of, 221 f. 

Bismarck, 166. 

Boone, Daniel, 203. 

Bowne, Borden P., 
"Gains for Religious 
Thought," 19; "Per- 
sonalism," 25; "The 
Christian Revelation," 
81; proofs of God in 
history, "The Imma- 
nence of God," (p. 
45), 149. 

Bousset, Wilhelm, "The 
Faith of a Modern 
Protestant," 220 f. 



Brooks, W. K., "Foun- 
dations of Zoology," 
117. 

Browning, inspiration 
of, 81 ; highest pro- 
duct of ennobling, 82 ; 
"Fra Lippo Lippi," 
123; "A Bean 
Stripe," 128 f; "Par- 
acelsus," 129, 205; 
"Francis Furini," 

130; "Take all in a 
word," 145; "Saul," 
181 f; "Pippa Pass- 
es," 198. 

Buckham, John Wright, 
"Personality and the 
Christian Ideal," 25, 
62. 

Bunyan, John, 197 f. 

Bushnell, Horace, God's 
world "a sounding 
board for the heart," 
175. 

Byron, on music, 174. 



Carlyle, man a genuine 
work of God, 35; re- 
garded as negative in 
thought, 137 f; heart 
of nature music, 175; 
effect of music, 179; 



INDEX 



245 



compared with Emer- 
son, 210 f. 

Carson, Kit, 203. 

"Chapter on Dreams/' 
R. L. Stevenson, 57, 
85 f. 

Charles, Elizfabeth, 

quoted in Aked's 
"The Courage of the 
Coward," 121. 

Chesterton, Gilbert K., 
a moralizer, 212. 

Christians, trials of ear- 
ly, 132. 

Chopin, 44. 

"City of Dreadful 
Night," 113 f. 

Civil War, (The Ameri- 
can) 159 f. 

Coleridge, a preacher, 
211 f. 

Columbus, what he dis- 
covered, 55 f; moved 
by impulse of faith, 
109 f; cannot be fit- 
tingly honored, 144; 
heard inward voice, 
166. 

Communion of God with 
man, 73. 

Conscience, a reality, 39 
f. 

Corinthians, second let- 



ter to, (3:1-3, 6-8), 
88. 

Corot, 199. 

Crawshaw, William 

Henry, supreme reve- 
lation of literature, 
"Literary Interpreta- 
tion of Life," (p. 
238), 195, 197. 

Creed, necessity of, 97- 

Cromwell's belief in 
God, 3 f. 

Crothers, Samuel Mc- 
Chord, a moralizer, 
212. 

Dante, his nature "one 
of intense belief," 10 
f; a lofty spirit, 135 
f. 

Darwin, Charles, views 
on religion, 19 f. 

David, belief in God, 3 
f. 

Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, 166 f. 

Dickinson, G. Lowe, 
"Knowledge and 

Faith," 24. 

Doctrine, 97 f. 

Dods, Marcus, "The 
Bible; its Origin and 
Nature," 77- 



246 



INDEX 



Dorchester, Daniel, 

"Christianity Vindi- 
cated by its Enemies/' 
140 f. 

Drummond, Henry, in- 
fluence of, 201, f. 

Earthworms, 118 f . 

Eggleston, George 

Cary, on "Clay and 
Van Buren, Lincoln," 
159 f; on "Uncle 
Tom's Cabin," 200. 

Emerson, on Nature, 
59; on Newton, 61; 
"Considerations by 
the Way," 63; on 
knowledge, 127; 

"New England Re- 
formers," 136; belief 
in righteousness, 136; 
his essays, 205; com- 
pared with Carlyle, 
210 f ; name of Jesus 
"plowed into history," 
236. 

Euckfen, Rudolf, his 
philosophy of life, 
89; the universe in 
man, "The Meaning 
and Value of Life," 
(p. 99), 127, 158. 



Evolution, doctrine of, 

71, 98, 112 f. 
Exodus, (35:30-35), 

183. 
Ezekiel, (1 :12), 165; as 

a mediator for the 

Nation, 232. 
Faith, stimulus of, 19; 

the hardihood of, 129. 
Faith of reason, 130. 
Fear, 132 f. 
Fiske, John, "What is 

Inspiration," 117. 
Form, striving after and 

breaking away from, 

43 f. 
Formulation of thought, 

96. 
French Revolution, 166. 

Gardiner, Ernest, "A 
Handbook of Greek 
Sculpture," 187. 

Gardiner, Percy, mean- 
ing of inspiration, 
"Exploratio Evangel- 
ica," (p. 478), 67. 

Genesis, first chapters 
of, 107; everything 
"good," 114; com- 
mand to subdue the 
earth, 122. 

Gibson, W. R. Boyce, 



INDEX 



247 



"Rudolf Eucken's 
Philosophy of Life," 
89. 

Gilbert, G. H., "Inter- 
pretation of the 
Bible/' 93. 

Gilder, Richard Wat- 
son, "The Song of a 
Heathen," 238. 

God, all men seek, 12; 
personality of, 23 f; 
crude thought of, 24; 
educating man, 28 ; 
He and His Truth 
unchangeable, 30 ; 
cannot limit Himself, 
30; record of His 
pjresence, 67; com- 
munion with man, 73 ; 
might and power of, 
115. 

God seeking genera- 
tions, 1 . 

Goethe, quoted, 62; in- 
dividuality, 205. 

Gold-miner, 3, 4. 

Gordon, George A., 
"The Christ of To- 
day," "The New 
Epoch for Faith," 
22 ; "Ultimate Con- 
ceptions of Faith," 
101, 183. 



Grant, General, victor- 
ious leader of Federal 
forces, 168; his na- 
ture indicated, 207. 

Grimthorpe, Lord, on 
Herbert Spencer, 113 
f. 

Grover, Delo Corydon, 
"The Volitional Ele- 
ment in Knowledge 
and Belief," 114. 

Gwatkin, Henry Mel- 
vill, "The Knowledge 
of God," 17, 26. 

Haeckel, Deity "a gas- 
eous vertebrate," 21; 
"man an affair of 
chance," 111. 

Heavens, visible and as- 
tronomical, 53. 

Hebrew manuscript, 

oldest, 76. 

Heine, world without 
God would be bed- 
lam, 137. 

Higher Critic, Luke the 
first, 219. 

Higher Criticism, 99. 

Hoffding, Harold, "The 
Philosophy of Reli- 
gion," 24. 

Homer, Milton, coun- 



248 



INDEX 



tryman of, 135; he- 
roes of, 203; bor- 
rowed material, 203 
f. 

Hope, all healthy life 
proceeds on basis of, 
7 f . 

Hovey, Carl, "Stone- 
wall Jackson," 168. 

Hydrogen and Oxygen, 
64. 

Illingworth, J. R., 
"Personality, Human 
and Divine," 22. 

Inge, William Ralph, 
The Gospel not in- 
tended to be shut up 
in book, "Faith and 
its Psychology," (p. 
119 f, 122), 85, 93. 

Inspiration, 71 ff; Me- 
chanical theory of, 
71 f; verbal theory of, 
74 f ; in modern liter- 
ature, 80 f. 

Isaiah, Dante imbued 
with writings of, 135; 
his significance as a 
prophet, 225 f. 

Jackson, Stonewall, his 
belief in God, 4; 



value as a soldier, 
167 f. 

James, William, "The 
Moral Equivalent for 
War," 154. 

Jefferson, Thomas, pro- 
phesied American 
Civil War, 63. 

Jeremiah, Dante imbued 
with writings of, 135; 
significance as a 
prophet, 225; as medi- 
ator, 232. 

Jesus, "Yet many 
things to say," 56; 
His words the meas- 
ure for estimating 
truth, 56 f; empha- 
sized spiritual record 
of revelation, 87; rev- 
elation cannot be 
bound in a book, 93; 
was not against form 
but liaid istress on 
life, 99 f ; makes dis- 
tinction between rev- 
elation and record, 
101; "My Father 
worketh," 114; "wars 
and rumors of wars," 
150; place of Judas 
in Jesus' career, 163 
f; danger of losing 



INDEX 



exact utterances, 219; 

character of, 235; 

name "plowed into 

history/' 236. 
Jesus Christ, mediation 

through, 233 ff. 
Job, "What is Man?" 

35; spirit in man, 57, 

79 f ; "Who hath put 

wisdom in inward 

parts?" 88; his cry 

for mediator, 228, 

231, 232, 239. 
John, Gospel of, (6:63) 

87. 
Johnson, Francis Howe, 

"God in Evolution," 

VII. 
Johnson, Mary, "The 

Long Roll," 168. 
Jjordan, David Starr, 

anthropomorphism in 

"The Stability of 

Truth," 22. 
Judas, place in Jesus' 

career, 163, 164. 



Kaaba, 184. 

Kipling, "The Explor- 
er," 27 f, 143 f; 
"Tomlinson," 157; 
"When 'Omer Smote 



'is Bloomin' Lyre," 
203. 
Knowledge a venture of 
faith, 17; a result of 
conscious effort, 18. 



Lamb's remark to Cole- 
ridge, 211 f. 

Legend, Orpheus and 
Arion, 175. 

"Les Miserables," 205. 

Life, cannot be ana- 
lyzed, 95 ; beginning 
of cannot be account- 
ed for, 98; set to 
music, 179. 

Lincoln, Eggleston's 
view of, 160; heard 
inward voice, 166; 
character of, 207 f. 

Liszt, 44. 

Logos, logos-doctrines, 
94. 

Lockyer, Sir Norman 
and Winifred, " Ten- 
nyson as a Student 
and Poet of Nature," 
106. 

Longfellow, inspiration 
of, 81. 

Lowell, James R., on 
Dante, 11; on the 



250 



INDEX 



Ten Commandments, 
223. 

Luke, how he got his in- 
formation, 78 f; the 
first higher critic, 219. 

Luther, 164. 

McConnell, Francis J., 
Belief as evidence of 
the Unseen, "Relig^l 
ious Certainty," (p. 
18), 1; "The Diviner 
Immanence," 55, 69 f. 

Man, the object of reve- 
lation, 26, 35, fF; can- 
not be reduced to his 
chemical compounds 
nor his likeness be 
found among lower 
animals, 35 ; manifests 
himself in action, 36; 
has will-power, 37 f ; 
knows himself to be 
under obligation, 39; 
habituates himself to 
discover truth, 58; a 
divine becoming, 149. 

Manuscript, oldest He- 
brew, 76. 

Martineau, James, "A 
Study of Religion," 
22; "Seat of Author- 
ity in Religion," 164. 



Mason, Daniel Gregory, 
art "the tender human 
servant," The Out- 
look, (26 April, 
1902), 173; "The 
Meaning of Music," 
198 f. 

Masterman, C. F. B., 
"In Peril of Change," 
46. 

Mathematician, at 

work, 58. 

Mediation, idea of, 228 
fF. 

Messiah, idea of, 233. 

Millet, Jean Francois, 
189 f. 

Milton, inspiration of, 
81 ; his belief in 
righteousness, 135 if; 
lofty spirit, 136; 
"good book precious 
life-blood of a mas- 
ter-spirit," 195. 

Mind, normal condition 
of, 41. 

Mithras, followers of, 
10. 

"Mona Lisa," 199. 

<Moses, knew God, 3 f; 
as a mediator, 230 f. 

Music, form in, 44; as 
a science or an art, 44 



INDEX 



251 



f; inspiration of, 79 
f. 
Mythology itself a 
myth, 203. 

Napoleon, a current in 
the stream of civiliza- 
tion, 165. 

Nature, impartation of, 
to man, 89 f; is the 
external world, 105; 
has a soul, 107; for- 
bidding aspect of, 121 
ff; has call to man, 
122. 

Nelson, Life of by 
Southey, 59. 

Neptune, discoyery of, 5 
f. 

New Testament, compo- 
sition of, 218 f. 

Newton, not aware of 
full meaning of law 
of gravitation, 56; 
how he came to dis- 
cover law of gravita- 
tion, 60. 

Nicodemus, Jesus' lesson 
to, 100; his attitude 
as a scholar to Jesus, 
101. 

Norton, Charles Eliot, 
"The Building of Or- 



vieto Cathedral," 188 
f. 

Old Testament, composi- 
tion of, 217 f. 

Orr, James, "Revela- 
tion and Inspiration," 
V. 

Paul, sermon on Mars 
Hill, 41; revelation 
cannot be bound in 
book, 93; Philippians, 
(2:12-13), 146; rec- 
ognized Jesus as per- 
fect Mediator, 234 f. 

Peabody, Francis G., 
"Religion of an Edu- 
cated Man." 101. 

Pericles, "Music of the 
Spheres," 174. 

Personality, cannot 

think of God apart 
from, 24 ; meaning of, 
24, 25. 

Peter, on mediatorship 
of Jesus, 234. 

Philippians, (2:12-13), 
146. 

Philosophy, as revela- 
tion and as record, 91 
f ; must take Jesus in- 
to account, 237- 



252 



INDEX 



Philosophers, pagan, 
133. 

Plato, on limitations of 
written word, "Phae- 
drus," 93. 

Prayer, true, exhibited 
in action, 140. 

Priesthood, idea of, 231. 

Prophets, The, how 
they foreknew, 62 ; 
the great, 225 f; as 
mediators, 231 f. 

Psalm, (22:1), 128 
(23:4), 134; (24:6) 
1; (37:1 ff), 134 
(77:19), 108; (78 
41), 161; (104:19) 
116; (104:24), 119 
(121:1), 134. 

Rashdall, Hastings, in- 
formation not super- 
naturally given, 

''Philosophy and Re- 
ligion," (p. 139), 51, 
63. 

Reality, fundamental, a 
personal Being, 1 2 ; 
appearance and, 53. 

Redwood trees, tower- 
ing height of, 108; 
age of and markings, 
109; silhouette of, 120. 



Religion, lofty souls, 
92. 

Religions, primitive, 9 f ; 
all similar in main 
features, 10; founda- 
tion of all, 20 f. 

Revelation, of God not 
only desirable but 
highly probable, 1 3 ; 
any fact which gives 
knowledge, 1 7 ; inex- 
haustible, 28; intellec- 
tually clearing, 29 ; 
timeless and extra-in- 
dividual, 29 ; moral 
and livable, 31 ; a 
challenge to the in- 
tellect, 57; in Bible, 
69; record of, 85 ff; 
includes more than 
man can record, 87; 
spiritual and eternal, 
record of, material 
and temporal, 89. 

Rousseau, age of, flip- 
pant and superficial in 
belief, 10. 

Rowland, Eleanor Har- 
ris, possibility of God 
speaking to man, 
"The Right to Be- 
lieve," (p. 103), 17. 



INDEX 



253 



Savonarola, inward 

voice calling, 166. 

"Scarlet Letter, The," 
205. 

Schiller, F. C. S., "need 
for a Divine First 
Cause," in "Riddles 
of the Sphinx," (p. 
197), 105. 

Schumann, "Ich Grolle 
Nicht," 199. 

Science, anthropomor- 
phic, 22; in relation 
to art, 45 ; substanti- 
ates Scripture, 52 f; 
strives for form, 97 
f; has gaps, 113. 

Seeberg, Reinhold, 

"Revelation and In- 
spiration," V, 82. 

Septuagint, errors in 
translation from Old 
Testament, 77 f. 

Shaler, Nathaniel S., 
"The Individual," 26, 
59. 

Shakespeare, Milton 

countryman of, 135; 
made free use of oth- 
ers' material, 204; re- 
sult had he lived in 
Browning's time, 

205. 



Shelley, "Beatrice Cen- 
ci," 198. 

Sill, Edward Rowland, 
inspiration of, 81; 
"The World's Secret," 
94. 

Sistine Madonna, The, 
239. 

Smith, George Adam, 
"Life of Henry 
Drummond," 201. 

Smythe, Newman, 

"Through Science to 
Faith," 26. 

Socrates, on fear, 133. 

Sophocles, Milton coun- 
tryman of, 135. 

Southey, Robert, "Life 
of Nelson," 59. 

Spencer, Herbert, forc- 
ed to posit "Unknow- 
able," 12; criticism of 
definition of "Evolu- 
tion," 112 f. 

Stevenson, R. L., 
"Chapter on 

Dreams," 57, 85 f; 
letter from "Weir of 
Hermiston," 60. 

Stonehenge, 184. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 
qualifications for writ- 
ing "Uncle Tom's 



254 



INDEX 



Cabin/' 199 f. 



Ten Commandments, 
222 ff. 

Tennyson, on mockery, 
41 ; inspiration of, 81 ; 
highest product of, 
82; "flower in cran- 
nied wall," 90; 
agrees with science, 
106; "In Memoriam," 
130, 206; desire to 
vindicate ways of 
God, 136; lofty spirit, 
136; hymns of, 140. 

Tetzel, 164. 

Thomson, James, "City 
of Dreadful Night/' 
113 f. 

Thomson, J. Arthur, 
"Bible of Nature," 
59, 116, 118, 119. 

Thornton, Sir Edward, 
on result of American 
Revolution, 167- 

Toy, C. H., "Quotations 
from Old Testament," 
77. 

Truth, at the center, 9; 
unchangeable, 30; al- 
ways comes as a mir- 
acle, 61. 

Tschaikowsky, "Nur 



wer die Sehnsucht 
Kennt," 199. 
Tyndall, on skepticism, 
9; "Fragments of Sci- 
ence," 117 f. 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 

199 f. 
Unseen, incentive of, 1. 
Uranus, influence of 

Neptune on, 5 f. 

Vivisection, 95. 

War, 150 ff. 

Washington, George, 
voice calling, 166. 

Watson, John, on Mat- 
thew Arnold, 140 f. 

Watts, Isaac, hymns of, 
140. 

Wells, G. H., a moral- 
izer, 212. 

Wesleys, the, hymns of, 
140. 

Whipple, Edwin P., 
opinion of Carlyle, 
138. 

White, Andrew D., "A 
History of the War- 
fare between Science 
with Theology," 163. 

Whitman, Walt, "Song 
of the Open Road," 



INDEX 



255 



115; "Song of My- 
self/' 119. 

Whittier, John Green- 
leaf, "The Eternal 
Goodness," 5 ; inspira- 
tion of, 81; songs of, 
140; quotation from 
"Miriam," (complete 
poems, Household 

Edition, p. 342), 215. 

Woodberry, George E., 



Criticism on Matthew 
Arnold, 138 f. 

Word, The, become 
flesh, 94, 95. 

Wordsworth, "Peter 

Bell," 90; "Tintern 
Abbey," 90, 108; on 
Milton, 135 f; "My 
Heart Leaps Up," 
209. 



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